


A Steep Fall

by silver9mm



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Anal Sex, Blood Drinking, Dark, Horror, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Minor Character Death, Other, Sad, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-12
Updated: 2016-02-07
Packaged: 2018-04-25 02:58:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4944118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silver9mm/pseuds/silver9mm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was impossible to imagine Dean Winchester crying. He had been all sunshine and storm, fool’s grin or glaring daggers, no in between that I ever witnessed. Except his soldier’s stare, blank, emotionless, only his hands giving anything away as they twitched, fingers like dowsing rods, Sam the current they sought. Sam had cried often enough. Laughed until his eyes were literally squirting, that was my favourite. Angry tears, sucking on bloody knuckles he only reluctantly let me pick debris out of, that had happened at least twice. Once, and I could never figure out why, his tears had leaked cold against my neck. That was when he’d told me, whispered to me in the sable shadows of the barn, that he loved his brother. That Dean loved him. He knew it now, finally. Dean had proved it, and Sam had been ecstatic and terrified and bursting at the seams with it. I had hugged him and he’d rained down fat icy drops on my skin as he laughed soundlessly into my ear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Soundtracks:  
> [8tracks](http://8tracks.com/silver9mm/a-steep-fall)  
> [Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuB2rGbcqG9nLiCDIpGJpef3Hs6vyRHvW)  
> [Tumblr tags](http://silver9mm.tumblr.com/tagged/asf)  
> Please see the end notes for information on the OC and MCD

He was just a tall silhouette blacking out most of the small entryway into the bar. He paused, probably squinting. After the neon signs outside and the bare bulb just inside, the bar was only sounds and shadows at first. Everyone—everyone new to the place—stopped to let their eyes adjust, while the rest of us beelined for the bar with its red Christmas lights behind the loaded shelves.

His hand came up and brushed hair off his forehead, and I nearly dropped my beer. I remembered that gesture, had seen it made repeatedly by a nervous boy of fourteen as we traded secrets, leafy pregnant joints and Zima I’d begged my older sister to buy for us.

I never thought I’d see him again.

The broad-shouldered shadow’s head lifted defiantly and he stepped into the dim mosaic of small tabletop lamps, twinkling strands and liquor-filtered backlighting that illuminated the room like muddy stained glass. When a net of tiny white holiday lights tossed its glow across his face and I saw those insane eyes, tilted and bright, I wondered for one guilty second if I _wanted_ to be seeing him again. I knew the implications. His family never went back to the same place twice if they could help it, he’d told me. Someone else would come around if need be. I believed him. I believed everything he’d said to me during the three months we shared a school bus, two classes every other day, a month of summer, and the field between our houses.

He saw me and cocked his head, ambered eyes narrowing.

“Ev?”

“Sam. Hey, you. Holy shit, you’re tall. Surprised you remember me.”

“’Course I remember,” he said wearing a lopsided smile, dimpled and somehow sweeter around the mouth than when he was a boy, and crossed the distance between us. I was caught by arms that could have wrapped twice around me. Instead, I felt both hands fist against my back. Everyone catches my long hair in a hug, but I didn’t mind my head being pulled back for once. I was looking right up the line of his throat to his jaw and I saw it clench briefly, felt those arms squeeze me, hard.

There was a moment when nothing happened, when the bar seemed to disappear around us and the pressure of his hold on me was natural, right, and when I closed my eyes, we were as good as floating in space, nothing beneath my feet.

“Sam,” I repeated. There was no reason for it. He let me out of his arms, and I was awfully glad the bar stool was right where I’d left it. “Beer?” I offered as he sat next to me. “They don’t have our usual, but lemme get you something.”

He laughed, a short, rough sound. I ordered an ale for him, pale and soft and creamy, something that reminded me of where the wheat fields met the cornfields, and the old yellow barn that crumbled there; of the dust motes we stirred up drifting in the sunbeams that shone through the windows and between broken boards.

“It’s been a long time.”

“Eight years,” he supplied. He sipped his beer and did that funny thing with his face, dipped the corners of his mouth down in some kind of smile, then took a deeper drink. “How are you?”

It’s a terrible habit to slip easily into self-centered babble. I wondered vaguely why I grasped so quickly for something normal. Nothing was ever normal with Sam, but I was out of practice.

“I’m okay. Got into UNL after high school, but I started late. Took some personal time,” I said, tugging on a strand of my hair. Sam’s eyes tracked my gesture and to his credit, didn’t drop any lower. I wouldn’t have minded. He was one of the few people in my life I’d ever wanted to look at me. “Then my mom got sick—”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and his fingers were damp from condensation when he put them on mine. I let him decide when to take them away.

“Thanks. I was working to get my b.s. in dietetics, but I had to come home earlier this year to help my dad take care of her. They both are…not well, you know?”

His fingers pressed mine flat against the bar for a second before dragging away, back to his glass.

“Taking a semester or two off, maybe more. Had to remodel so my mom can get around in her power chair since she can’t walk, looking after my dad so he doesn’t burn the house down trying to cook. Helping with the farm, though there’s not much of it left. Some goats, chickens. Mostly just corn, now, but I gotta do most of what Mom used to while Dad works, and take care of her. And him, some days. And that’s what I’m doing. Living back at home.”

“Where are the rest of your brothers and sisters? Can’t they help?”

“They’re all—” I waved my hand dismissively. “You know, older than me. With families now and their own jobs and bills and lives. Easier for the baby to drop out of school.” I paused, watching Sam’s consolatory eyebrow quirk. And then I watched him look over his shoulder, catch himself, and his eyes fell heavily, greyed, back to his glass.

I shouldn’t have said it. I actually thought that: _Don’t_ _ask_. But I fucking did it anyway. “What about you? Where’s Dean?”

I should have let him tell me. He would have. He told me everything about Dean, eventually. Told me because it didn’t matter that he did except that he trusted me. He would never see me again, he’d promised. Swore it, swore _about_ it: that his dad took everything away from him. Friends, schools, sports, books, toys. The only thing Sam always had, the one thing his dad could never take away, was Dean.

“He’s gone.” It came out like the laugh, like he was bad at doing it, saying those words. The look on his face was practiced, though. It had worn grooves, a mask of grief that fit like he had sat for it, had it sculpted special.

It was my turn to touch him. Such a strange thing, that touch: that it doesn’t hurt. It should hurt, I think. I mean, when someone is in so much emotional pain that your own gut responds, twists around itself, and your heart aches for their loss, _actually_ _aches_ , it would only make sense that their skin would hurt, too. That the gentle pressure of another person’s hand would feel like fire, would sting; would make them crumble, collapse in on themselves. And for a second, it seemed like that’s what was happening to Sam Winchester. His head dropped, those proud shoulders folded, clipped wings. His hand under mine curled into another fist. He was shaking, or was it the bar around us? Was his grief so strong he moved the earth with it? The very air shimmered around him for a moment, and I felt dizzy, unbalanced, and gripped his curled hand in mine. Sam looked at me, the movement of his eyes pushing tears into the corners.

“I’m sorry, Sam,” I whispered. “I know…” I didn’t finish. I didn’t need to. I knew, and by the jerk of his head and the noose-tight smile he gave me, I was still the only one who did.

“You don’t have to, okay?” I offered.

He straightened, snapping up like a white pine in heavy wind, and half turned, looking over his shoulder at the entrance. “Later,” he murmured.

I blinked, surprised. “You’re sticking around?”

“We’ll see,” he said and flashed me a tired, nervous look.

There was no mistaking his father’s backlit frame as he trudged in from the night, heading straight for us. The man had terrified me as a kid with his sloughy eyes and angry smiles and bellowed demands. Both his boys had withered in his presence and I’d darted away like a frightened animal more than once at the mere sound of his truck grinding up the drive. We’d hated him together, me and Sam, in our adolescent way, but I had long since lost my passion for it, without Sam around to stoke it with his tears and bruises.

He wasn’t going to scare me away from Sam anymore.

Truth is, I might as well have not been there at all. John banged up against the bar and pointed at the whiskey low on the shelf, grunted uncaringly at the beer backer flavour, and tossed all of the former and half the latter back before he even acknowledged his son sitting at attention by his elbow.

“We’re here for a spell,” he muttered, glancing at Sam. His eyes glided over me with all the care of looking at an unadorned wall, without even the hint of recognition. And Sam made no effort to jog his memory. If anything, Sam turned some, putting his back to me, making himself a shield between his father and me. But he kept his face in profile, looking down at his lonesome hand, still fisted on the bar. I held my glass tight with both hands.

“How long?” Sam asked through the noose.

“Sixteen days. You got cash?”

There was curl of his lip and then the slap of money against the bar. A lighter slap, and Sam’s hand slid off his dad’s shoulder. John didn’t move. Sam waited, silence stacking tall between father and son. Finally, Sam turned to me. I caught John’s eyes moving in the statue of his body, watching Sam, seeing me. He knew who I was. I didn’t shiver. Sam spoke:

“Wanna go?” It wasn’t a question, and the smile wasn’t real, either.

“Yeah,” I said. “One second.”

He stood, eyes glassy, the smile cut through his face with a knife.

“Blue Ford. Stepside,” I added, almost apologetically.

Sam followed me halfway across the bar. I hung a left, peering back to watch him disappear out the door. I caught a tumble of motion on the other side of the bar as I went into the bathroom, and before I even had my stall locked, a rattle and clack of low heeled shoes and chattering voices swarmed in after me.

“Evie, is that who I think it is?” Jesse pealed.

“ _Little_ Sam Winchester?” Amanda tittered.

“Your _boyfriend_!” they giggled in unison.

“Jesus christ, how old are you guys?” I rolled my eyes, safe with my blush in the stall.

“He’s _so_ hot. How does that _happen_?” Amanda wailed, throwing wadded paper towels at me over the partition.

“He moved away from here, is how,” Jesse assured. “Are you letting him _leave_?”

I grinned. No one could see. I had to let it out. “No. He’s waiting for me.”

I pushed out of the stall, Amanda leaning on the door.

“I’ll fight you for him,” she said.

“I have a knife,” I countered, washing my hands. “And I will cut your tits off.”

“Rude! You always were weird about him.”

“Just weird,” Jesse teased.

“You’re the one with a taxidermy collection,” I countered. “Half of them with deformities.”

“True.”

“I’m serious, though. Just leave him alone.”

“ _Okay_ ,” they chorused, all sharp teeth and know-something smiles.

I made it out of the bathroom by promising them details later, lying about it, and left the bar without hurrying, without casting back at John.

Sam was leaning against my truck, head tipped, face to the stars. Pretending to fumble with my jacket, I took a moment to study him. He had been a cute boy, and Amanda was not wrong about him now, but all I was seeing in the long lines of his body was tension. Early summer wind blew his white button-down shirt tight against his chest, and I tried to imagine what he’d endured to put such heavy muscles there. He looked as if he were asleep on his feet, and I was inexplicably sad, wondering when he’d last had a full night’s rest. A night he’d felt safe enough to sleep through.

I said his name as I approached. He’d have heard me coming, of course; known he was no longer alone. I just wanted to say it. To have him hear his real name spoken by someone who knew the real him.

“Nice truck,” he said.

I saw his dad’s stepside a few spots down. I didn’t ask about the Impala. Dean’s pride and joy. His one true love, though Sam and I both knew that wasn’t true.

“Let me drive?”

“Promise you can drive better than you could roll a joint?”

He laughed, that bruised sound again, and I knew right then I’d never stopped being in love with him. Not for a minute in all the years since I’d last seen him.

“I promise. Cross my heart.”

He could drive _much_ better. We bounced out of the parking lot and tore down the highway for a few miles before he took a blinkerless right, and we spent the next hour drifting over one lane roads, corn and wheat for guardrails, yesterday’s full moon our only streetlight.

“Know where you’re going?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

We both knew.

“Tell me a scary story, Sam.”

“I went to college—”

“And got the bill. The end.”

“Right. But no, actually, I got a full ride. Scholarships.”

Of course he did. “Your dad actually let you go?”

“No. I left anyway. I had to.”

I debated asking, but he was baiting. “Why?”

“Dad…found out. He tried to make Dean leave. But Dean…he wouldn’t have made it on his own. I tried—I wanted him to come with me. To Stanford. But he wouldn’t, wanted just to do what Dad thought was best. It was _stupid_ , but he was freaking out, and the only way I could keep him safe was to leave him behind.”

The fields were a pale gold blur on either side of us, and my truck was picking up speed. I unbuckled my seatbelt, turning sideways against the door so I could see Sam better. There was no reason to look at anything else.

“Dean’s gone,” he repeated. “We kept in touch at first. Text, email. He sent me fucking postcards. Hardly ever called—one of us would end up crying.”

It was impossible to imagine Dean Winchester crying. He had been all sunshine and storm, fool’s grin or glaring daggers, no in between that I ever witnessed. Except for his soldier’s stare, blank, emotionless, only his hands giving anything away as they twitched, fingers like dowsing rods, Sam the current they sought. Sam had cried often enough. Laughed until his eyes were literally squirting, that was my favourite. Angry tears, sucking on bloody knuckles he only reluctantly let me pick debris out of, that had happened at least twice. Once, and I could never figure out why, his tears had leaked cold against my neck. That was when he’d told me, whispered to me in the sable shadows of the barn, that he loved his brother. That Dean loved him. He knew it now, finally. Dean had proved it, and Sam had been ecstatic and terrified and bursting at the seams with it. I had hugged him and he’d rained down fat icy drops on my skin as he laughed soundlessly into my ear.

Sam said, “But he called me one night about a year ago. Told me he found it.”

“It?”

His eyes shone wolf-silver in the darkness. I could smell the water from the lake through the open windows.

“What killed our mom.”

“Oh! What was it? Did he find it? Is it dead now?”

“I don’t know if it’s dead. Dean disappeared. He said it was a demon, Ev.”

The moon hid her face behind tall pines, abashed because she knows all the answers before we do but doesn’t speak our language. Not even a reflection showed on the lake as we launched up the side of the dam. It was somehow colder without her polished-nickel shine.

“Demon.” I tried the word out in my mouth. It fit too well, honed by other words he’d taught me: ghoul, wendigo, werewolf, vampire, succubus.

“I tried,” he said as he steered the truck into a viewpoint pull off and put it in park. The white beaches below us snaked along the dark edges of the water. Here and there a campfire winked. The summer nights were long and mild, and the towering thunderclouds were hundreds of miles away, looming impotently in the western sky. “I tried to get him to leave it alone. Or…or to come and get me and we’d go after it together, me, him, and Dad. But he wouldn’t listen. Said he had to do it himself. Made me promise not to tell Dad. Like it was supposed to be some kind of fucking surprise. Like it’d make up for, for…”

I wanted to hug him like I had all those years ago when he’d told me Dean had kissed him on those white sands below us. I knew if I touched him, Sam’s face would be hot, flushed like before, and I wondered about those tears again. I stayed where I was, half-turned to him in the cab of my truck, watching him tap his fingers absently over the wheel. He ducked his head, long hair falling over his eyes, and that, _that_ was how I remembered him best. Shy, embarrassed about everything. His second-hand clothes, his slight build, his nomadic family. About being too smart, too quick, too cute. Embarrassed by his no-good, greedy-eyed older brother and Dean’s loud music and loud car and loud laugh. _Mortified_ by his own feelings, and he watched me now same as he did back then, with a smile like a startled deer and eyes that could only meet mine between heartbeats. The smile darted off, but his eyes, shining, stopped jumping away.

“I waited a week, and when he didn’t pick up, I finally called Dad. I should have sooner, but… Dad came and got me and we’ve been looking ever since.”

“Do you think…he found the demon?”

Sam jerked his head back, but there were no stars to see. He swallowed hard. “Yeah,” he said, his voice low and wet, a landslide of fear and loss. “Yeah, I think he did. And I think it killed him. We’ve been trying to find out. Most things, most monsters, ghosts, whatever, they don’t know what we’re talking about. But we’ve found some leads. Things that escaped from Hell, things that can travel between here and there. Dad thinks maybe they’ll know.”

I looked out at the lake. The moon was peeking out over the trees now, writing what she knew in archaic scribbles on the rippling surface.

“Sam,” I started, trying not to think ahead of what I was saying, my goosebumps ignoring my will, “is that why you’re back? Is there something here…like that? That might know about Dean?”

He nodded, the lake in his eyes, a leak in the dam. “Dad says we can trap it, get information out of it.”

“What is it?”

“A nixie. We killed its mate before. Dad didn’t know then they always come in pairs. They hibernate, and we caught the male while the female was still asleep. She’s out there, and gonna wake up again. They’re some kind of Germanic water demon. Dad thinks she’ll know something.”

I remembered the drownings that precipitated Sam’s arrival. A rash of them, all children. The lake was big, a man-made mini-sea. The first white people to settle this land, pushing the natives out, had been mostly Germans, and they brought seeds and names and crafts and their gods with them, apparently.

“People are going to die, aren’t they?”

Sam’s jaw jutted out, his lips tightened. “Probably,” he admitted. “We won’t know where she is until she hunts. The lake’s big,” he echoed.

“Sixteen days, your dad said..?”

“’Til the new moon. That’s when she’ll come out of hibernation. We’ll keep trying to figure out how to find her before she does, but…”

“Sam,” I whispered. It seemed a terrible thing to ask any other way. “Why…why would your dad want to find Dean? I mean, if…if he knows… And he split you guys up. Does he regret it now?”

“Honestly, I don’t know,” and he laughed as he said it. “Maybe he just wants to kick Dean’s ass again. Maybe he wants to forgive us both.”

“Did he? Hurt Dean?”

“Yeah. And Dean just fuckin’ took it. I had to make them stop. With Dean’s gun.”

“Jesus christ, Sam. How… When?”

“Right before I was gonna go to college. There are no coincidences in this life, right? Anytime before that and I would have had nowhere to go.”

A breeze from the lake top lost its way and foundered through the driverside window, and Sam turned his face into it, breathing in memories.

“I can hardly stand it, Ev,” he said to the gust as it shrugged past him to tickle my ears. “We made a deal, me and Dean. I’d go, he’d stay until I was done with school, then he’d come to me. Stay with me, and we’d figure something out. Whatever Dad had going on by then, he’d have to do it himself. Dean promised me. And we were so close to that. I don’t know if Dad put something in his head to make him think he had to do this thing by himself, or what. I just…miss him. It fuckin’ kills me. Every single day I wake up and I don’t remember he’s not there and after a couple seconds it hits me, and it’s making this pit inside me. I look for him, you know? Everywhere I go, I turn and expect to see him next to me. At a bar, in some stranger’s house on a case, in…in a motel. I couldn’t drive his car. I just couldn’t. We found her, took her to Bobby’s yard.”

“Bobby?” I asked because there was nothing else I could say, nothing that would ease Sam’s pain or find Dean or take us back in time.

“A ‘friend’ of Dad’s. Another hunter. He practically raised me and Dean, Dad was out of it so much. Hunting, drinking, whatever. Bobby was always there for us.” Sam let out a long sigh, and I could have sworn I saw his breath in the cab. In the distance, half-mile-high clouds spat lightning.

“It’s weird talking about him to you,” he said, finally turning in his seat to look at me. “I say these same things to other people, a few who knew us, you know? But it’s different. With you.”

“I know, Sam.”

“Yeah.”

Lightning again, in the corner of his eye, and it slid down his cheek. He wiped at it and bared his teeth for a second. “I can’t, uh. I’m. So, so, how are you, huh? I mean, night off or something?”

I wanted to give him that touch again, the one that should hurt. But his composure was soap-bubble delicate and I was afraid to destroy it completely. Instead: “Kind of. I took the night off, anyway. Mom had a meltdown. I don’t know, man, I think she’s got her stool softeners mixed up with her hormone medication or something.”

That won me a real laugh, childlike, and Sam clapped his hand over his mouth. “I’m sorry. Sorry, oh god, but, wow.”

“No, it’s very funny. And scary at the same time. Crazy woman. I bailed. There’s no point in fighting with her about, ugh, whatever. Who put what where, just stupid shit. It’ll be something different tomorrow. Always something with her. I can’t blame her. She’s scared, everything is out of control with her now. Her body, her health, her home. I just take off for a while when it gets too much for me. What?” I asked, because Sam was staring at me.

“You’re good, Ev,” he said. “That’s so good of you, taking care of your parents. No one trusts me enough to let me take care of them. Dean was so over-protective. I mean, you saw. And my dad’s either hovering over me like I’m ten, or acts like he’s half-scared of me for some reason. Doesn’t want to be alone with me, it feels like. Like it’s not safe.”

And then he shifted, bending one impossibly long leg and putting his foot on the seat, and leaned over, and I had a lap full of soft brown hair and pink cheeks and tightly closed eyes. Automatically, I moved, gave him more of my thigh to rest on, and there was nothing to do with my hands but put them on him; one over his ribs, and with the other, I pulled strands of hair away from his lips and forehead, tucking them behind his ear. He was five times the boy I had last hugged, taller, wider, heavier in body and heart, but it was the same as it ever was.

“I feel safe with you, Sam.”

He made a wretched noise, his ribs humming with the sound under my palm. His head twisted in my lap and his eyes opened, but they were black in the shadows of the truck.

“I do—” I wanted to insist, to elaborate, but he wrecked the rest of the words when he pushed himself up on one elbow and kissed me. It was an awkward angle, and I was too surprised to kiss him back for a second. I might have been in love with him, but kissing him was never really part of that. I wasn’t Dean. I wasn’t ever going to be what Sam wanted. I knew that even now, even as he dug his long fingers into my hair and pulled me against him, forced my mouth open, teeth scraping against mine, I wasn’t what he wanted. Who he wanted. But I was here, and Dean was not. Dean was dead and I felt safe with Sam and I knew his secrets, and if that made him want to kiss me, it was okay.

I licked into his mouth and it was cold. His tongue was cold, his teeth icy, his saliva well water cool. It shocked me enough to draw away, but he came after me, his fingers keeping my head from the metal door frame, pressing me back into the corner. He squeezed my face between his palms, trapping me, and his tongue chased mine, almost sharp with the chill clinging to it, and I remembered his tears, his white breath. I thought of Dean, and ghouls and water demons and I hadn’t seen Sam in eight years. He could be anything but what I thought he was, who I assumed him to be, but the rush that had me arching up off the seat, grabbing his arms for purchase, wasn’t fear. I felt as hot as his kiss was cold, boiling inside to have even this much of Sam, these left-over feelings and childish ease and a broken, taken heart.

He was hurting me, his knee shoved hard and carelessly between my legs, his fingers now clenched and pulling in my hair, and his kiss was anything but gentle, but that was all distant, vagaries like shapes in a swift river capped by thick ice. There was a sweetness to him though, something I could taste along with the ale I’d bought him, as if he’d been chewing cinnamon gum recently, and I shivered so hard I moaned into his mouth, confused and turned on.

“Sorry,” he said, teeth pinching my lower lip with the word, and he kissed me again before dropping away, kicking himself back against the driver’s side door with his heels. “I’m sorry, Ev, I shouldn’t have done that.”

I licked my lips, tasting beer and cinnamon and snow. My hair was half knotted around my neck, tangled by his suddenness. I clawed it over my shoulders again and slid down into my seat, only now aware he’d lifted me against the door high enough I was almost sitting on the armrest. He looked down at my hand as I reached for his, and I thought he was going to pull away, keep me from touching him, but he only turned his face to the windshield. His fingers curled around mine. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

I finally found my voice. “No, Sam. Don’t be sorry. I liked it. I like you, you know that. And that was awesome, actually.”

He bit his lip, peering intently through the glass, and I wondered what I tasted like to him. If he even could taste me with ice on his tongue.

“You know I’m going to leave again,” he said slowly.

“I know.” I did.

“I have to find Dean.”

“I _know_. What can I do to help you?”

He whipped his head around, eyes like tracers in the night, and his expression was so full of love, pained and desperate, and even though none of it was about me, for or because, it still hit hard. Blacked out my brain, made my heart thump. My cheeks flushed, my chest heated, and my belly and lower, and a calm like I’d never experienced before slipped like silk down my spine, and Sam was looking at me. Just looking.

I was prepared this time. If anything, he was the one that seemed shocked to be kissing me again. The look of devastation was still there, but he closed his eyes and that’s the only reason I could bear him coming so close. His eyes had always charmed me. Exotic, clever pinwheels of colours to match every season and mood, they were what I gauged him by, always. Not what he said, how he said it, what he did or when. It was all in Sam’s eyes, and he closed them, holding his soul inside, keeping it from pouring out, liquid heartbreak and loneliness. I let him kiss me, put his hand to my throat, his fingers seeking and finding my racing pulse, and this one was sweeter, just closed lips and gentle pressure, no teeth, no biting, no frost.

“Lemme take you home, Sam. Make you something to eat.”

He nodded, nudging his forehead against mine, eyes shut. I reached across him and opened the door and prodded him until he was out of the cab. He walked around to the tailgate and I pulled the rearview back to my height and watched him pause and piss into the weeds, a little smug that it seemed to take him a few extra seconds to get it going. He spit, then looked up and that apparently helped. I pulled the seat forward just as he opened the passenger side door.

“Sorry about your knees,” I said as he folded himself into the truck. “And hold on. I know a shortcut.” I flicked the brights on and sailed down the lane, chasing a lone rabbit back into the fields.

He wasn’t smiling or anything by the time we got to my parent’s house, but he didn’t look like he was going to shatter into a million pieces. Or like he was going to eat me alive. He was hiding again, behind his bangs because he couldn’t hide his eyes, not from me. Head down, he toed off his shoes and followed me quietly to the kitchen. The best thing about the house I’d grown up in was the sprawl that kept my parent’s room at one end with their own bathroom and office, and my room and the family room, as well as two other empty bedrooms, at the other, the kitchen not quite in between, close enough to the family room that Sam and I could talk quietly while I scrambled eggs and fried sausage, slicing up already boiled cold potatoes, browning them in the sausage grease before dumping the eggs over the whole mess and turning it down to low. I put a lid on it, planning on waiting another few minutes for the top to cook through when I heard the distinct bumps and clicks of my mother waking and coming through the house.

“Who’s there?” she demanded.

“The boogeyman,” I said, and Sam wrinkled his nose at me. I shrugged.

My mother rounded the corner to the family room in her strawberry coloured flannels, seated in her candy apple red power chair, her hair in two iron and wine braids. I think with her fondness of all shades of red, she was disappointed I inherited the darker Irish genes from my father. Pepper freckles, black hair shiny like a raven’s wing, my dad was fond of saying. I had my mother’s eyes, though. Keen looking, round and blue. Like a Valkyrie, she insisted.

“It’s late, Evie,” my mother pointed out.

“I know, Mom. We were trying to be quiet.”

“Hello, Mrs. Jones,” Sam said, standing.

She squinted at him.

“Sam Winchester. I went to school with Ev. We lived down the lane. My dad and brother—”

“Dean,” my mom said, and smiled. I hadn’t seen her smile in days. “Your brother, he helped Papa fix that panel wagon. I don’t know why Papa bought that thing but after they worked on it, it ran great. Sold it a year later, I still see it sometimes on the road.”

Sam nodded politely. I swear if he’d been wearing a hat, he’d have been holding it in front of him like a churchgoer, giving my mom these puppy dog eyes. “He’d be pleased to hear that, ma’am. How’s your husband?”

“He’s just fine. I got up to tell you to keep it down, he has to go in early, you know.”

“I know, Mom.” If anyone was going to wake him up it was her, thrashing about and crashing into things with her chair, but I stifled myself and squeezed past her to check on the eggs.

“We’ll be very quiet, Mrs. Jones,” I heard Sam murmuring to her. “Ev was just looking after me. I came into town tonight, haven’t had time to eat—”

Amazingly, in a minute or two, my mom scooted down the hallway back towards her bed. I carried the plates to the family room, handing one to Sam before sitting next to him.

“I can’t believe she didn’t freak out. You do some magic or something on her?”

“Guess I can be charming.”

We ate in silence, watching muted cartoons, my ankle hooked behind his. Halfway through, he started pushing food around on his plate, a habit he’d apparently never lost.

“Here,” I said, and he handed me what was left. I scraped it into the bin for the goats and Sam was sprawled on the couch when I returned, his eyes closed. Again, I knew he knew I was there somehow, even though I was a master at creeping through my own house, and the thick carpet padded my already quiet steps. _Kind of preternatural, aren’t you, Sam?_ I thought, looking at him. I would never say that to him, but it had never seemed wrong.

He was utterly gorgeous. It was late, early, whatever, and I let my mind think what it wanted, and it wanted to think about those mile-long legs in soft, worn, dark blue denim. About the thick muscles of his thighs, and the way his shirt had bunched up when he’d slouched down, revealing the cut of his hip and a slice of his flat stomach. How wide his shoulders were, how fucking strong he looked lying there, half asleep. His hands were on his chest, fingers overlapping, a spidery tangle. I’d always loved his mouth and his upturned nose, and his eyes were open, looking back at me, blue-green and bruised at the edges.

“Sleep with me?” he asked.

“Yeah. Okay. Not here, though.”

I knew he didn’t mean sex. He needed comfort, and he knew I wouldn’t ask anything of him that he wasn’t able to give. I’d always just let him be himself and he’d done the same with me, even if it meant we didn’t say or do anything for hours. Many early evenings were spent like that, in the barn or at his place, the clattering, run-down farmhouse that he’d finally admitted was a sort of hunter safehouse they were squatting in. Quiet, both of us studying, reading. He always had twice the amount of work I did: once he put his geometry or biology textbook down, he picked up some dusty, cracked-leather tomb or flipped through Reader’s Digest _History’s Mysteries_ , and I’d nap on his couch, waking to see him rubbing his eyes and taking notes.

The rumble of Dean’s Impala would rouse me, his brother coming in the house moments later with all the subtlety of a rocket launch, jettisoning jacket and boots and take-n-bake pizzas or buckets of chicken, leaving car grease smudges on Sam’s homework and books and cheeks, and it wasn’t very long after I started hanging out with Sam that I _saw_. I saw Sam frown and look furious with a blush to match, but that was before I knew about his eyes. Watching them and the way they watched Dean, how they followed him around and lit up like the sky on the fourth of July no matter how annoyed he _seemed_ to be, I saw how Sam really felt. It wasn’t a ‘before Sam knew how he felt’ thing. No. Sam was well aware of his feelings.

He trailed me to the bathroom where I rooted around and found a spare toothbrush for him. I left the overhead off, a nightlight more than enough. We cleaned up silently, watching each other in the blue-black mirror and Sam bumped me almost contentedly with his hip.

The room I was living in hadn’t been mine as a kid until way after Sam had disappeared one summer night without saying goodbye, but he wouldn’t have known the difference. He had never come to my house. Had refused to do so. Even Dean had never come inside, instead helping my dad out a few times on the far side of the property at the big blue garage that housed the tractor and tools and the occasional beater I was positive my dad picked up just to irritate my mom. This room was the biggest and always belonged to one of my older siblings. My bed was in the middle of the floor, huge and frameless. A couple dressers, a chair and a desk, all draped in what I didn’t want to wear. My bookshelves were in a different room, and I almost felt like explaining that to Sam, apologising for the lack of them. But that could wait.

“No jeans in bed,” I said, reaching for him.

“That a rule?” he asked, letting me.

“Mom’s rule.”

“Smart woman.”

“Sometimes.”

His jeans came down and there was the cinnamon again. Like it was coming out of his fucking pores. He toed his socks off with the jeans and stood there in his boxer briefs, a curl to his mouth, one dimple showing, an inkwell.

“This, too.” The few buttons holed came open easily and I took his shirt to join what was tossed across the chair. He followed me again, just a few steps, but I didn’t realise it until I turned and he was right there, quiet and huge and if he didn’t stop looking at me like that, my heart was going to stop.

“Here,” he said, no real sound to the word, and hooked my thin jacket with his thumbs, pulling it off my shoulders and it was tossed next to his shirt on the chair. His hands returned to my shoulders and I found the colours in his eyes finally, grey and green, and didn’t look away from them when his palms drifted down my body, smoothing my shirt over my breasts.

“A bit different than at fourteen, I guess,” I mused when he finally met my eyes, his fingers resting on my hips and the top of the low slung jeans there.

“Yeah. You could say that. I… You look really good. You’re beautiful, Ev. Always have been.”

“Thank you.” It was all I could manage. I wanted to tell him he looked like a fucking god incarnate, but I wasn’t sure if in his line of work that would be the compliment I meant it to be.

“No jeans in bed,” he said solemnly, tugging.

I reached between us and popped my fly open, hiking one hip to help him drag them down, and then stood there in my panties and t-shirt, him in his wifebeater and briefs, like a couple of nervous virgins. That wasn’t the case with him, I was dead sure of that.

That look from him again, and my nerves dissolved. “Bed?”

“Mm, please.”

He let me lead him to it. I crawled into my usual spot, and the bed dipped as he slipped in beside me on my right. A habit, I rolled to the left. Away from him: his hands, the heat of his body, his limpid eyes and wounded, sweet mouth, but the heat came with me, fitted itself to my back and legs. How could I stop myself from wriggling against him, adjusting so we were slotted together like old lovers, or like two people dying of exposure? I couldn’t, and, with his breath in my hair and his arm around my waist and my window open even though I was usually sure there was a werewolf just on the other side of the screen, I fell asleep almost instantly, impossibly safe.

_Dean flops down between us, elbowing me and digging his fingers into Sam’s leg near his knee so hard Sam yelps and kicks at him. I have to scoot away, extracting my own knee from under Dean’s thigh. He winks at me and squirms down into the seat, spreading his legs, taking up as much room as he can. Sam shoves him uselessly. Dean’s hand is still on Sam’s knee._

_“So!” he says cheerfully, and I know some sort of teasing remark is coming next, but I don’t expect— “You two make out yet?”_

_My timid and honest “No” is completely eclipsed by Sam’s indignant “Dean!”_

_“Well, just warning you, kid,” Dean says to me, looking at Sam, eating up his baby brother’s fury like ice cream, “Sam here won’t know what he’s doing ’cause he’s a total prude, and probably never even practiced on the back of his hand like I told him to.”_

_I see Dean squeeze his knee again, just as hard, but Sam is like stone, staring at Dean with slitted eyes._

_“You let me know, huh? If it really sucks, I’ll hire someone for him if I have to—”_

_Sam has been hiding his balled up fists at his sides, and it catches us both off guard when he finally swings on Dean, but Dean’s quick and grabs Sam’s wrist. When Sam doesn’t struggle, doesn’t try to pull away, keeps moving forward, I hold my breath at what’s happening. Sam shoves himself against Dean, his free hand grabbing onto Dean’s shoulder._

_“Why don’t you find out for yourself, you wanna know so bad?” Sam hisses and kisses him._

_Dean’s eyes stay open, wide with shock, and they flick for an instant to mine, but he doesn’t see what I think he expects to see: I am not surprised at all, now that it’s finally happening._

_Sam’s lips are smashed against Dean’s at first, nose squished into Dean’s cheek, but then he slowly begins to ease back, letting Dean’s lips pillow up again, and Sam opens his mouth, his tongue touching Dean’s bottom lip, wetting it, flicking along the rim. Dean’s eyelashes flutter, his emerald eyes almost close and both boys take a quick breath, sharing it, and then Sam screams, the fingers of his right hand splaying out before curling uselessly as Dean crushes his wrist in his grip. He slings Sam to the floor, sending him to his knees and his back against the solid coffee table, and in a silent blur of black leather and denim, Dean’s across the room and slamming through the front door. There’s no space between the Impala waking with a snarl and the sight of her shooting down the lane._

_Sam’s pale and shaking, on his knees still, holding his twisted wrist against his chest._

_“Don’t tell,” he whispers, eyes the same solid green as Dean’s and too bright._

_“Sam, I won’t. I promise. Are you okay?”_

_“Yeah. F-fine. You…you promise? Really?”_

_“Sure, really. Why would I? We’re friends, aren’t we? C’mon,” I say, pulling him onto the couch again._

Thunder woke me from the dream, the memory, just in time to see lightning put the sunrise to shame. Sam was plastered to me, sweat-slick, cock thick and tapping against my ass. He was muttering and fussing, hands trembling over my stomach and in my hair.

“Sam,” I softly tried. He whimpered and his teeth snapped together, startling me enough that I shifted, but his arm tightened around my middle even as he pushed with his hips. I pushed back and he gasped, half a name that wasn’t mine. I pushed again, gently this time, prying at his arm so I could get a decent breath and for a second I thought he was going to fight me getting free, but then he groaned and flipped onto his back. He was going to say he was sorry again, but I stopped him. With my hand first, fingers over his lips, then I kissed him when I managed to get on one elbow and over his chest. He was the one that started it, I figured it could be a bit of a thing now.

“You smell like my birthday,” he said a few minutes later, calmer. Still hard against the back of my thigh where I had my leg slung over his hips. “Like sugar. And lilacs. They always bloom in May.”

“Don’t say shit like that to me, Sam,” I pleaded, burying my face against his shoulder.

“Why not?”

“’Cause what am I supposed to say?”

“Whatever you want.”

Fine. “I love you.”

“I love you, Ev.”

I closed my eyes and eventually felt him fall back to sleep. At least doze, because if it had been a deeper sleep, I’m sure the dreams would have started again. Dreaming of Dean, the proof of that hot under my leg.

If Dean were alive, Sam wouldn’t be here, with me in my bed. He wouldn’t have just said he loved me, no matter how he meant it. The only reason my night had gone from typical to extraordinary was because Sam had lost the most important person on the planet to him and I happened to be in the right place at the right time when Sam’d come looking for him, and all I felt was bad for Sam. Not even a little happy for myself: just sad for him.

I listened to rain fall; the thunderheads, finally having given up acting tough, now wept for us. I listened to Sam’s heart beating steadily under my ear. I listened, and the sky mourned, and the sun battled to shine.


	2. Chapter 2

Sam’s phone woke us. He reacted as if he’d been wide awake and waiting for it. Maybe he had. I’d let the rain lull me to sleep again, and maybe he’d just been holding me in his arms as the morning slowly cheered itself up. At some point, I had curled onto my side, my back against him, and it was the careful slip of his arm out from under my head and the feel of him sitting straight up in bed that roused me more than the phone call itself.

I rubbed my eyes and yawned and wiggled against him and under the blankets, twisting around to press my face into the indentation his body had left, not so subtly breathing in his scent. If I smelled like springtime, Sam smelled like late fall. Like overturned earth after the harvest, something deep and secret and thick like wine mulled with blood and cinnamon. I rubbed my face into it, hearing him muttering quietly above me. When I finally peeked out, he was frowning.

“Yeah. Okay, yessir,” I heard, and then he tossed the phone on the bed, leaning back slowly, giving me time to squirm out of his way.

“Everything okay?” I asked. I’d only ever heard him address his dad as _yessir._

“He sounded kind of weird. And he wants me to come back to the motel, says something’s up. Bobby called, too, so I’ll have to get everything for the trap. He’ll double check some of his books, call back. We’ve already been through the library here, the local archives. Last time. I kinda doubt there’s anything new, but Bobby’s got books the Vatican would be jealous of.”

The last word came out a mangled yawn and he arched up off the bed onto the crown of his head, stretching so hard things popped and cracked inside him, and I had never seen so many muscles in any one place, ever, let alone strung together so beautifully. When he flopped back down on the bed, I had stuffed the edge of my finger in my mouth and was gnawing on it.

“What?” he said, familiar.

“What do you think, Sam?” I said around my wet finger.

A tired smile. “How are you, Ev? Not much sleep last night. Sorry if I kept you up. I have dreams…”

“I noticed.”

The smile faltered. “Sorry,” he repeated.

“It’s okay, Sam. I’m fine. I like having you in my bed.”

Sam laughed, and it sounded easier to do this morning. “When did you stop being so shy, huh?” He elbowed me gently, knocking my hand away from my mouth.

I closed my eyes and remembered the moment, and then opened them, preferring this one. “When you left. I decided to be bold, like you.”

“Am I?”

“When you have to be, yeah. I think so.”

“I guess,” he said, and we were both thinking of my dream last night. He brought his hand to my face, touching my cheek with his fingertips, touching my freckles I realised, and I closed my blue eyes again and let him, then I felt him pick at the tangled hair by my ear in a futile effort of reclaiming it, and then he just took a gentle handful and pulled me onto his chest again. He kissed my forehead, then handled my head back to kiss my lips.

“Bold _and_ brave.”

“You know it,” he said.

“You gotta go, huh?”

“Gotta. Can you give me a ride?”

I nodded and ducked out of his arms, forced myself to let go of him rather than coil around him and beg. I could feel him watching me as I rifled through clothing until I found what I wanted, and then I slipped out of the room and to the shower.

Clean and dry, I let Sam do whatever he needed to in the bathroom while I rounded up my mom and the goats that were scrambling away from her and her weird new ride. She ditched me and headed back to the house, and I hurried through my chores for Sam’s sake.

He met me at the porch with a scone in his mouth, my mother yelling pointless precautions at us through the closed door.

“She’s sweet,” Sam said, tolerant as ever. He handed me half the scone she’d forced on him.

“Mm. Where to?”

A motel at the west end of the main strip was where. We were quiet at first, still waking up. I liked the silence. This was my own little world, in this truck with Sam. If Sam had asked, I would have just kept driving, kept him next to me for as long as he’d let me. I knew he wouldn’t ask, wouldn’t want.

“You should come with me.”

“What?” I didn’t mean to sound so shocked. The timing hurt.

“Don’t leave. Come in with me.”

“To—to see your dad?”

“Yeah. I mean, it’s only fair.”

“Haha. My mom can’t hold a candle to John Winchester.”

“True. Maybe I just want to show you off.”

“Appealing to my ego. Slick, Sam.”

He smiled, easy, but there was that look again, that stare. I was not strong enough for this. I could only look away once he did, tilting his head, indicating I shouldn’t be sitting at a stop sign like I was waiting for it to turn green. We passed the high school, empty on a Saturday, and he let out a quiet sigh. “It’s weird being here again.”

I surprised myself. “Sam, what _are_ you doing?”

“I—what? Did I do something?”

“No. Why are you _here_? With _me_?”

“Do you want me to go?”

“No! I mean, dammit—I mean, I just… Why aren’t you looking for Dean? It just seems weird you’re not spending every waking moment trying to find out what happened.”

He gave me such a patient, sad smile I felt like an asshole for questioning him.

“I had been. I looked, I prayed, I summoned, I tried to make deals. I took drugs to make me astral project, I tried talking boards. I forgot to eat and eventually to sleep, and about two months ago, I collapsed. Just dropped onto the floor. Dad had to take me to an emergency room.”

“Jesus christ, Sam.”

“It’s the only time he ever talked about Dean to me, directly. It’s like we both silently agreed to do this thing, to find him, no matter what it takes, but Dad won’t talk about him unless it’s absolutely impossible not to. But when I woke up, hooked to fluids and feeling like I’d been hit by a semi, Dad told me Dean wouldn’t want me to be like this. Would want me to take care of myself, to have fun.”

I couldn’t imagine the word ‘fun’ coming out of John Winchester’s mouth, but I was sure that _was_ exactly what Dean would say.

“I ignored him. For awhile. Then, I realised I’d been up four days in a row again and I was starting to hallucinate. Hearing Dean, seeing him. And Dad wasn’t, and I did everything I knew to figure out if it was really Dean or not, and… It wasn’t a spirit or a recording or a revenant or…anything. It was just my brain fucking dying from lack of sleep and food, and I was never going to find him if I kept it up. So, I…didn’t stop, but I slowed down. I slept. Let Dad do more for us. And he did. Took some of the workload that I was, like, hoarding or something. Had us take some nights off. He was the one that mentioned you when we knew we were coming back here. Not that I didn’t remember you, but I wasn’t going to say anything to him. I was fucking blown away when he said I should look you up. Said maybe we could have a beer, have some fun. I was already planning on finding you.”

“You were? Since when am I fun? I was never _fun_ , Sam.”

“Maybe not Dean’s idea of fun, but I like being with you. I always did. I missed you. I was so pissed when Dad made us leave in the middle of the night. Not like it was the first time he’d done that, and I’d left friends before in other places. I just… I loved you. I do love you. You weren’t like anyone else I’d ever met.”

“You, either.”

He ducked his head. “In more ways than one, huh?” Sam’s mouth twisted into a pained smile. “Even Dean, he, he, uh, tried to get Dad to give us another day, for me to say goodbye. He knew, you know? How close me and you were. He liked you. ’Cause you stuck by me, and I trusted you. And you were there…”

I pulled into the motel parking lot and found an empty spot, then I turned to Sam. Head still down, he peered from under his lashes. They were gathering together, wet and sticking to one another. “You were there, Ev. You know, if you hadn’t been…when he left, after? I don’t know what I would have done. I thought he was gonna freak out, hate me. Tell Dad. That I’d fucked up big time. I thought all that and I felt like dying, but you were there, and you kept me from going crazy. From doing something bad. I wanted to. I wanted to fucking die, but you were there and you didn’t think I was fucked up.” He blurted laughter. “Or if you did, you were pretty cool about it.”

“I didn’t, Sam. I don’t. You can’t help how you feel. I know that. And Dean’s all you ever had, why wouldn’t he be all you ever wanted?”

A gust of wind shoved at the truck, and the clouds shook a few more drops down on us, a light sprinkle, and Sam used the moment to compose himself. His face was splotched, cheeks and nose, but he wasn’t crying and he wasn’t hiding, and he was gorgeous.

“Should I ask to kiss you?” I said, consigning myself to a day of talking without thinking first. “I’m not really clear on this whole thing.”

He laughed again and something about my question made a tear slip from his eye. He bit his lip and shook his head, and I felt his lip pop free of his teeth against my lips, and then his hands were on my face, cradling at first, then almost squeezing, and I bore the pressure, the almost-pain, letting him feel me, hold onto me, keep me however long he needed. It was a long time, but it could have been forever. He let me go and got out of the truck in one motion. “C’mon, Ev.”

I didn’t get out. Beer and the midnight hour had made me brave last night. Now, I was fifteen all over again and petrified. I gripped the steering wheel. I couldn’t seem to let go of it. Sam was peering in at me. He circled around to my side, leaned in the rolled-down window and raked hair out of his face, the strands gleaming chestnut and chocolate in the gold light the sun was shoving through the last of the rainclouds. His eyes were bright, pale green and amber, but still strained at the edges, and he gave me a bemused smile.

“I’ll protect you.”

“Oh, that makes me feel _so much_ better.” I took a deep breath through my nose. I’d never felt especially judged by John, but I couldn’t help that he made me nervous, and it _was_ awkward knowing he’d basically wanted Sam to hook up with me. To get Sam to forget about Dean for even a moment.

As if.

The door opened and Sam plucked at my elbow, still smiling, a wily look to him that won the day. I got out and let him close up the truck and he let me lean into him the whole way across the parking lot. He banged on the motel door: a corner room, John’s truck outside parked for an easy escape.

“Hey,” Sam barked through the door, “Dad, it’s me.” There was a muffled grunt from inside that Sam seemed to understand and he keyed the knob. “I’ve got Ev with me, Dad. We can go get some breakfast—” he began and cracked the door.

The dirty, damp smell of mildew made me cover my mouth involuntarily. Sam pushed the door open without finishing his sentence and put a hand to my chest, holding me back while he leaned into the room. Not that I was eager to enter.

“Dad!” Sam darted inside. I followed more cautiously, hoping some of the smell would escape before I shut the door behind me. With it closed, most of the light was gone and whatever Sam had seen was harder for me to discern.

“Sam?”

“The overhead—”

I flicked the switch. John was in a t-shirt and jeans, sitting on the edge of one of the beds. Sam crouched next to him, looking between his dad’s face and the towel John had clenched in one hand. The towel, and John’s white shirt were both stained, poorly tye dyed in green. As I was looking, baffled, I saw a thin stream of water run from John’s left nostril and drip from his mustache onto his shirt. John coughed and that caused a shower of droplets to fall, staining him more. He put the towel to his face, pressing it to his nose and mouth, and then he glared at me.

“Sam,” he gruffed, “why’re they—”

“Ev knows, Dad. We might need some help.”

John _almost_ didn’t scoff, but couldn’t quite contain it.

“What _happened_?”

“The nixie,” John said, groaning as he tried to stand. Sam helped him up and to a chair. John sat, his elbows on the small table. Sam shoveled newspapers out of the way and took the seat opposite his father. I could see now that John was running with water, nose and eyes, his beard dripping. Even his ears looked wet.

“Dad—”

“She was at the bar last night, Sam,” John said, sounding like he was half-gargling the words.

“What? But I thought—”

“I know what we thought. Apparently, she came out of hibernation early, or we were just wrong about the facts.” He’d stopped glaring at me long enough to glance up at Sam, and then looked away. As if embarrassed. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know who she was…”

Sam’s jaw dropped. “ _Dad._ ”

John actually laughed. His shoulders shook and he dropped his head sheepishly. Then another sopping cough rattled his chest and he closed his eyes, scummy towel to his mouth as he tried to breathe.

“What, uh, jesus, what happened? I mean—” Sam threw his hands up as his dad blew his nose, eyebrows raised. “No! I mean, what, oh my god. Okay, what do we do? What—how did—what’s wrong with you? She did this?”

John nodded. “Bobby’s working on it. I can’t see for shit with my eyes watering like this or I’d be out looking for her.”

“Who is she? I mean, did she give you a name? What’s she look like? Do you think we can find her?”

“Melanie Hicks. Blonde hair, long. Tall. Real natural way about her.” John looked at me as he said that last thing and I wanted to glare back at him, but all I managed was a blink and to fumble my hands together awkwardly. I was still standing by the door, behind Sam.

“Got blue eyes like yours,” John added.

At that, Sam seemed to remember I was there finally and waved me over. There were only two chairs, so I sat on the edge of the bed Sam hadn’t slept in last night.

“Does that sound familiar, Ev?” Sam asked. “Anyone you know?”

“No. I’m sorry. But it wouldn’t would it?” I wondered aloud, remembering. My older sister had loved fairy tales, had read them to me, and something came to mind. “Things like this, they don’t…possess people, right? They take on a form? Like boys with horse legs or girls with fish scales? Or just horses, or rabbits.”

“Or pretty maidens you don’t want to piss off,” Sam said, watching John wipe at his weeping eyes. “Dad, what’s happening to you?”

“I don’t know, son. Feels like a helluva cold. I was fine when she left last night. I was okay when I called you earlier, but ten minutes later, it’s like someone’s sump pump backed up in my chest.”

“Smells like it,” Sam said, nose wrinkled.

“Like a pond,” John agreed. “I wonder—”

“Or like the lake in the summer,” I interrupted. “There are the shallows on the…southwest side that dry up a little during the hottest parts, get all mucky and mosquito-filled.”

“Can you show us where?” John said, and reached for a map amongst the papers Sam had moved, but the effort seemed beyond him and Sam jumped to grab it up as John slumped back in his chair, breath wet and rattling in his chest. As he was unfolding it, John’s phone rang.

“Hey, Bobby. Yeah, Sam’s here.” John put the phone on the table after thumbing it to speaker.

“Bobby, what it is?” Sam asked.

“Stupid is what,” Bobby grumbled, his voice like the rock tumbler my dad always has running in the shop. “Now I know where your boy got it from.”

We all knew he wasn’t talking about Sam. Sam pouted, and John just put his hand to his forehead, leaning on his elbow tiredly.

“Gonna lecture me, old man, or you gonna help?”

“Old enough to know better, apparently. Look, John, she’s turning you. Shoulda saw that comin’, seein’ as you killed her mate. Seems she likes the cut of your jib.”

John was nodding as if he’d expected it, towel pressed to his mouth. Sam stared, wide-eyed, at his father. Then he shot forward in his chair, knocking into the table.

“Bobby—”

“Sam, get a pen,” the voice on the phone instructed, more patience in the tone now that he was addressing Sam. I handed him one from the other bed.

“Got it. What do we do?”

“There’s things you’ll need to reverse the spell. You ready?”

A shell, herbs—grass, really—salamander toes, and John began coughing so hard Bobby’s voice was drowned out. He didn’t get the towel up in time and watery mucus splashed onto the table, dripped from his mustache and beard and the dark, murky smell made both Sam and I cover our faces this time. John tried to get up, lurching towards the bathroom, but staggered, hacking like an old lawn mower resisting the pull cord, and Sam leapt to help him keep his feet.

Bobby was still talking. “Hey, anybody there? What was _that_? Sam?”

John was retching into the bathtub, Sam holding him up, and I could hear liquid splattering onto the porcelain. I went to the table and edged the phone and the journal Sam had taken notes in away from the wet mess.

“Uh,” I answered nervously, “Sam’s with John. He’s having a lot of trouble breathing, I think. I can finish the…um, spell ingredients.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Sam’s friend.”

“That boy ain’t got no _friends_.”

“He’s got me,” I answered, suddenly defensive.

“Yeah, well, that’s not a title I’d go around flashing in people’s faces, you know what’s good for you.”

I was ready to tell this old man to go fuck himself when Sam came out of the bathroom. “Bobby?”

A tired, tinny, “Yeah, Sam.”

“This isn’t good.”

“ _Duh_.”

Sam was searching for something, a clean shirt and a wad of other material, his brow tight with worry. “Ev, can you talk to Bobby? Bobby, my friend—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Bobby huffed, “I heard.”

While Sam helped John, I jotted down a few more items and what to do with them as Bobby related them, my small, neat script looking terribly out of place on a page otherwise filled with the knife-edged slashes of John’s writing and the familiar scrawl of Sam’s, and I had to write around a sketch of something fanged and hairy.

“They gotta get to the nixie’s den. She’ll be working the spell from there, and even killin’ her won’t stop what’s happening to John; got to destroy her altar, or whatever it is. The easiest way to find her den is to find _her_ first and follow her there. These creatures got an affinity for outdoor markets—”

“Like a farmer’s market?”

“That’ll work. Now, if you gotta get in a boat, put something iron or steel in the bottom, it’ll protect the boat from being capsized if she sings up a storm.”

“Sings?”

“That’s what I said, ain’t it? Unless you wanna get drowned and eaten.”

“How do we destroy the altar? And kill her?”

“ _Sam_ will have to burn the altar, and she’s vulnerable to steel and silver, and consecrated oil. Decapitation, fire, stabbed in the heart.”

Sam emerged from the bathroom with John, half-dragging the man to his damp bed. John was pale, dark circles under his eyes, and I could hear the gurgle of his breathing in his throat. He shook his head as Sam tried to lay him down flat, so Sam helped him sit up against the headboard. When John was steady, Sam cast a quick glance over my notes.

“Bobby, where’d you find all this?”

“Some online German Apocrypha. _Dämonen sprechen Deutsch, natürlich_.”

“He says we have to find her and follow her,” I said, looking up at him as he leaned on my chair, reading over my shoulder.

“Sam—”

“There’s a farmer’s market today,” I started, cutting off what I felt strongly would be an admonishment from this Bobby guy that there be no _we_. “At the fairgrounds. I remember that from the stories, too. They like markets, all the people around them. I can take you.”

“Bobby, is there anything we can do for Dad right now? He’s in bad shape.”

“Yeah,” the voice growled, “you can hurry. Call me if you have to.”

We left John coughing weakly and spitting muck into a small trash can. Sam raided the GMC for weapons, stashed glinting knives on himself, and tucked a couple dented flasks into his jacket’s pockets. He turned to me, his lips in a grim line. I half-expected him to tell me to leave, that he didn’t want me to be involved, and I wondered for an instant why I was going to fight him about it. Why _was_ I helping? I knew it was dangerous. But this wasn’t the first time in my life I’d taken a risk, that I’d put myself in a position of being physically hurt—I’d actually done things that _guaranteed_ I’d feel it for days to come. And here was Sam, who’d shown me what the reward for risking everything could be.

“Here,” he said. A knife, sheathed in worn, stained leather, the hilt silver and tarnished. I took it from his hand and slipped it into the inside pocket of my jacket.

The farmer’s market was spread around the fairgrounds: homemade booths elbowing each other across invisible lot lines, overflowing with midsummer produce: a mosaic of red and yellow, purple, orange, green and white. I knew many of the vendors, but the turnout was large, the usual number of attendees doubled at least by the Piccadilly and 4H taking place at the same time.

I reached out and tugged on Sam’s hand and couldn’t keep myself from grinning when he didn’t let go, threading a few of his fingers through mine, and, holding hands, we waded into the swelling crowd.

I wondered which one of them might die when the moon went dark.

I spotted Amanda at her family’s booth, surrounded by radiant jars of honey and boxes of gooey comb. Her shit-eating grin signalled she’d had her eye on us already. I tried to shut her down with a look, but she was, as ever, completely immune to manners. I was grateful when Sam’s phone rang. He kept ahold of my hand as he answered it, but then:

“It’s Bobby. I gotta talk to him.”

I left him by a flower booth, just far enough away that he couldn’t hear whatever rude shit was gonna come out of Amanda’s mouth, but I could still see him.

“ _Tell me everything_ ,” Amanda purred. “You took his big ass home last night, right?”

“I did.”

“You totally banged.”

“We _totally_ did not. We watched cartoons.”

“You are so lame.”

“I know. Hey, did you notice that guy who sat at the bar with us last night right before we left?”

“That hot fucker wearing a brown leather jacket?”

“Sam’s _dad_ , yeah.”

“Nice.”

“Do you remember seeing a woman talking to him later? Blonde—”

“Yeah, actually. They left together,” Amanda said, eyebrows suggestive.

“Have you seen her today?”

“Nope,” she said, bagging a jar for a customer and slipping their kid a honey stick.

“Do me a favour and keep an eye out for her? Call me if you see her. Like, _as soon_ as you see her?”

“Sure thing. What for?”

“Promise I’ll tell you later,” I said, probably lying again. Sam was in the flower booth now, his back to me, still on the phone. “You been up to the lake lately, Amanda?”

“Nah. But Dad’s there all the time.”

“Oh yeah, he’s on duty this season, huh? I’ve always wanted to drive one of those patrol boats. Has he said anything about the water level? Is it low or..?”

She shrugged and then tilted her head, motioning. Sam was heading towards me, picking apart a wildflower bouquet. “He hasn’t said, but I imagine it’s about the same as ever.”

“Hi. Amanda, right?” Sam said, all dimples as he offered her pink and blue coneflowers.

“I remember you, Sam! You used to be—”

“I know, short. Things change,” he said, tucking a cluster of tiny white daisies into my breast pocket. He still had a handful of accent grasses in his hand. “See her?” he murmured.

“No. Amanda’s gonna call me if she does.”

“Thanks,” Sam said sincerely.

We left, crowded out by a cluster of old women bickering about _triggels_ and bake sales. Amanda waved and sniffed her flowers dramatically. All I could smell was the lemongrass Sam was clutching.

“What else you got?” I asked, plucking at the grasses.

“Uh, sweetgrass, lemongrass, and I’m hoping this is fowl mannagrass. I don’t know where we’re gonna find salamander toes, though.”

“Jesse!”

“Who?”

“A friend of mine. Went to school with us. You probably don’t remember, but, um, he’s into taxidermy. I bet there’s a salamander in the collection.”’

I called Jesse, waking him up. Groaning and cursing, he promised he’d meet us as soon as he could with a dried tiger salamander. Sam kept searching the farmer’s market for the nixie while I waited by the parking lot for Jesse. He showed up about twenty minutes later, dishevelled and smelling like tequila. He tossed a crispy, curly-tailed striped salamander at me.

“Gross! Jesus, you coulda at least put it in a paper bag or something, huh?”

“Eat me, Evie. You owe me breakfast for this.”

“Promise. Not now though. Go home and brush your teeth before the cops smell you. I’ll call you.”

His Oldsmobile made as much noise as he had upon waking and almost drowned out my phone ringing.

“Ev! That broad is over by the apple stand, the Drop Farm,” Amanda informed me, all excited to be spying on someone, I was sure.

“Do you see Sam?” I asked, hurrying back towards the center of the market, debating on whether I should put the salamander in my pocket. I was pretty sure I’d forget it was there and crush it into little pieces.

“Nope. I think he ducked into the Piccadilly.”

“Is she still there?” I was just coming up to the place and didn’t want to miss her. Or run straight into her.

“Yeah, she’s chatting up Willis. Man, she looks like she went to Woodstock.”

I saw immediately who she was talking about. Everything about the woman was anachronistic: from her long honied hair to her white linen tunic to her grey bell bottom jeans, she was something out of the sixties, missing only a flower crown on her head and bare toes sticking out from under the damp hem of her pants. In place of those things, her left ear was showing through the gold strands, tattooed. A basket pattern or something, it was hard to tell, but it was intricate and ebony-inked and covered the fold and the top part of the shell of her ear. Her low heeled boots still made her a head taller than me. Mr. Willis was watching her talk, money in his fist as if he’d forgotten where his pocket was. Her hands were moving, delicate fingers weaving circles, spiraling, tracing faint symbols in the air.

“Watch her,” I whispered and Amanda didn’t protest. I saw Sam pass by the door of the Piccadilly and raced to get him. Only a dozen yards separated us, but I couldn’t seem to move fast enough.

It was noisy and dim inside the building compared to the glaring grey-filtered sunlight of the morning. I blinked and squinted, peering around for Sam. The crowd was dense, people squeezing by each other to paw through dusty tables stacked high and teetering with old records, dingy war-time soda bottles, toy horses, books, greasy farm tools. I didn’t understand how Sam could have disappeared so fast, and I glanced over my shoulder, back to the farmer’s market, praying the nixie woman was still there and that Amanda hadn’t gotten distracted.

“Hey,” I heard in my right ear. I gasped and turned into the sound, and into Sam’s lips. They were chilly, his tongue raising goosebumps on my arms as it touched mine softly. He put his hands on my shoulders and moved me back with him into the shadow just inside the door, and I had no idea any longer what I’d come to find him for, except this.

A family entered the building and spread out just inside, bumping into us, oblivious of their diaper bags and flailing stuffed animals and we broke apart unwillingly just to make room. I licked my cold lips as he smiled down at me, a look in his eyes that almost made the air between us shimmer like a desert mirage, or a shockwave, turning my intentions to vapour. Sam leaned into to kiss me again and I let him, my hands limp at my sides as his own pushed into my hair, cupped my ears gently, blurred the sounds around us in to a gentle hum.

My phone rang.

“Oh! Sam, Sam, wait—”

“Ev. Yeah,” he slurred, still holding me, “okay, I’m sorry—”

“No, Sam. She’s out there!”

He blinked, frowning, and I shook my head, stepping back from him, out of his hold.

“Amanda saw her. _I_ saw her, c’mon!”

I tugged him by the wrist to the door, pausing just a second to see if she was still in sight. Her gleaming blonde hair against the red fabric of Some Holes Farm’s booth caught my eye. She was standing motionless, her back to us, as the Wanek twins, toddlers, circled her legs, faces upturned and grinning at her.

“Sam, doesn’t she steal kids in the fairytales?” I whispered as he edged in front of me and slowly forwards, moving to the left of her.

“Not in public, probably. Here,” he said, reaching behind him, for me. I realised I was clutching the dried salamander still and hazarded putting it in my pocket so I could take his hand. Together, we moved cautiously down the knoll that separated the market from the piccadilly and edged around the outside of the booths. It was easy for Sam to keep his eye on her, able to see over people and produce stands, so I kept us from tripping, nudging him away from and over the curbs and corners of booths, extra boxes. I still felt flushed from his kiss, the way he had moved me into the darkness with him, and I was very aware of my pulse pounding through my body: chest, belly, between my legs.

Sam made a noise, a little grunt, and I bumped into him we stopped so abruptly. I turned to peer through a gap in the stalls, and there was the nixie, looking right back at me. Her eyes were blue, as John had said, but shocking somehow. Cornflower and silver flake, the purest pond filled with darting fish. Maybe it was knowing what she was, maybe it was just her, but a wave of malevolence washed over me, made me press myself against Sam’s side with a shiver that did nothing to reduce the ache and pulse of lust inside me.

It was only a second, one tiny moment that she was focused on me. Galloping children were coming, powered by lemon bars and trailing powdered sugar. They swept by her gleefully, and she turned with them, a trickle of a smile at her lips. I jerked my eyes from her, up to Sam. He was watching her, and only looked away by a force of will it seemed. He glanced around. Not at me. He scanned the grounds behind us, once, twice. He was looking for Dean, and would not find him. He was flushed, the recognition when he looked down at me barely tightening his dilated pupils. He would always be looking for Dean. I felt foolish again for having questioned that. He would always look, always reach for Dean, always leave space for his brother to speak; and only the ache I felt for Sam, for his loss, trumped the heat in my body from being so near to him.

A fog seemed to lift from his eyes and it was almost crushing, the amount of feelings he had in him, how much he wanted to give them to Dean, to share them with his brother, and here I was, and I was _not_ strong enough for this.

I squeezed Sam’s hand and he squeezed back.

The nixie was moving again, an arbitrary path through the market. She paused occasionally to fondle and admire: children, apples, crafts. She purchased a few things, as well. Rather, she pointed to and was given without exchange whatever she wanted, leaving a dazed vendor in her wake. She visited the same flower booth Sam had earlier, and we watched as she plucked strands of grasses and already dried flowers from their bundles and tucked them behind her ear, smile a showing of small, neat white teeth, her long-fingered hands always moving in those weird patterns. She never looked over at us again, but I felt like a breath held too long anyway. Eventually, she seemed satisfied with her visit and wandered towards the parking lot. My phone was buzzing in my pocket, rattling the salamander. I blew it off before I put it to my ear.

“Ev, did you fucking see all that? She just _took_ —”

“Yeah, I did. Amanda, thank you for helping. Stay away from her if you see her again, okay?”

“What the hell, man?”

“Just trust me. I gotta go.”

At the far end of the lot, the woman—what had John called her? Melanie?—plucked the door of a white Volkswagon Rabbit open and slipped inside. Sam gripped my hand hard, drawing us around the front of my truck as the Rabbit went by, and he waited a ten-count before releasing me.

“Go, go. Not too close, but don’t lose her.”

“That’s not gonna be hard. It’s a one lane town, remember?” I started the truck, but before I pulled away I scooped the dried salamander out of my pocket and handed it to Sam. “Take this, please.”

There was just enough traffic that I was sort of confident the nixie wouldn’t notice we were tailing her. A lot of people were heading up to the lake. Sam was rummaging through his purchases from the market, crushing up herbs and chipping at the salamander with his thumbnail, dropping all the bits back into a paper bag, white, with a honeycomb stamp on it.

“Still need a shell,” he said as he reached into his jacket.

“There’s white clams at the lake, always some along the shore. Will that do?”

“Mmhm,” he noised, a flask to his mouth.

“Holy water?”

The laugh was an escapee, something he hadn’t expected. He turned away, towards the window. “Uh, no. No, definitely not holy water. …It’s Dean’s old flask.”

He didn’t offer it to me.

We joined a meandering string of cars all braving the questionable weather to spend the weekend on the shore. As we neared it, vehicles took rights and lefts at will, off towards various campgrounds and trailheads and beaches, and soon it was just the white Rabbit and us curling along the western bottom edge of the lake. I slowed and let bends in the road keep us out of sight as much as I could. There weren’t as many places to pull off in this direction and I wasn’t afraid of losing her at this point, and after we passed the second to last pull off, I knew where she was going. I pulled the truck over about a quarter of a mile from the last campsite at Sam’s direction.

“I’m coming with you,” I said as he carefully folded the little paper bag with the spell ingredients in it.

“I know,” he replied. “I didn’t figure you would let me ditch you, and besides, you’re safer with me.”

“I am?” It shouldn’t have been ominous, what he said, but it was. I’d expected an argument and had my own ready. These were my people in danger, too. My friends at the lake, some of them with their own kids now, and they would all be in danger if we didn’t stop this creature.

“She saw you, Ev. Saw you with me. And chances are if she remembered my dad, she knows who I am. If she slips away somehow, I don't want her going after you without me right there to protect you. You have that silver knife?”

I nodded, the blade stiff and weird feeling against my breast.

“Good. Alright.” He grabbed a small duffle off the floorboards and got out, and together we hurried up the road towards the only place the nixie had to park her car before heading down into the marshy edge of the lake.

The wind was picking up again, blowing the rain clouds around, but not quite away. By the time we neared the last little lot with its barely used trailhead, I’d zipped my jacket up and knotted my hair to keep it from whipping me in the face.

Sam spotted the car before I did and he pulled me into the trees.

“Can you see her?”

He shook his head, peering through the brush. “I can hear her car cooling. She’s not far ahead.”

All I could hear was a strange whistling sound, bird-like. Or no, child-like? Animal. A lilting, mournful noise. The wind was wicked now, plastering Sam’s hair to his cheeks.

“What’s up there, Ev?”

“The marsh. An island, a small hill that’s barely out of the water most of the time, but they block this side of the dam to fill up the recreational part of the lake during summer, so it sticks out more. We can walk to it, I think, from this side, but the far side is lower and still has water up to the banks.”

The wind was incredible. As we broke through the pines along the shore and onto the open beach, I could hardly see, one hand up to shield my eyes and face from blowing grit. Every step we took seemed to make it worse, and all at once Sam turned, tucked me against his body and wrapped his arms around me. I felt something hit him, hard, heard him grunt at the impact, and was pelted along my exposed legs. When Sam let me go, I could see his back was covered with debris, sand and dirt and spongy pieces of wood, as if one of the waterlogged stumps nearby had been pulverized and blasted at us.

I asked—shouted over the wind—if he was okay and he nodded, keeping my hand in his as we trudged forward. Sam must’ve been able to see some sort of path; I was only able to look down at where I was stepping, my feet becoming more and more tangled in reeds and logs that were usually under water. We were slowly nearing the little rise of land, and the trail was treacherous. Huge wet weeds from the bottom of the lake were slippery and we kept each other from falling more than once trying to navigate over them. I didn’t think I’d be able to hear Sam at that point if he’d tried talking to me, the wind a white noise roar in my ears, swirling around my head, rising and falling in pitch like a million distressed songbirds. The ground was mushy, sucking at my legs, trying to pull my worn cowboy boots from my feet. I wasn’t dressed for hunting monsters. Scratch that, I had a halter top on under my jacket, jeans, a silver knife, and a man who had been a killer since puberty holding my hand. I could do this.

All at once, the blustering wind abated some, stopped clawing at my eyes, and the noise of it dulled. I looked around, wiping at my watering eyes. Sam had led us around the base of the hill and under an overhang.

“Have you ever come out here before?” he asked, raking his hair off his face, tucking it behind his ears.

“Not this far, no. There’s a little swamp area over that way,” I answered, pointing northwest, “that I used to go to sometimes with Jesse, looking for bones. We never slogged out here.”

He nodded, edging further into the shadow of the overhang.

“Hey,” he called, waving me to him, “I think this is a way in.”

To my eyes, it looked like nothing. Like a wall of mud and rock, and did so until the very second that Sam put his hand out and through it. Then what must have been an illusion, a guise, disappeared, and I could see an entrance to a dimly lit tunnel.

We stepped into it.


	3. Chapter 3

I turned back once to look out the way we’d come, and within the shelter of the tunnel, protected from the wind almost completely, I could see that the storm was concentrated around us, the hidden entrance, and the path we’d walked to get here, and nowhere else. The trees on the far shore, the clouds over the lake, the birds between, seemed utterly unaffected. It was unnerving.

“Must be her ward,” Sam said, watching me. “You wanna stay here? I can—”

“N-no. No, don’t—I’m okay. It’s okay, let’s keep going.” The very idea of separating from him made me feel a little sick, weak at the knees.

“Okay. Stay close.”

Easier said than done. The tunnel was all smooth rock, sweating, dripping around us, making footing hazardous and my pace slow. Sam was more sure-footed and got out of reach several times. I didn’t lose sight of him: the tunnel was bright enough, sunlight beaming in holes that went clear through to the surface overhead. They were just big enough to fit a body through, making the tunnel accessible all along its length when the island was underwater.

Sam was getting further from me, taking three steps to my every one, and the distance between us was becoming unbearable, painful. I wasn’t scared so much as I just felt… _needy_. Desperate for him. Like I was going to float up and away through one of those holes as the breeze from outside found us again, blowing from around a bend ahead of us, if he didn’t turn and hold me down. I tried to call out to him, but he didn’t hear the whine, the throaty whimper that came out instead of his name. I kept moving forward, towards him. He was all I could see, all that I was aware of, and then he stepped around that bend and I froze in place, my heart pounding. I felt lightheaded and put a hand out on a ledge, a broken place in the tunnel wall that was like a small shelf. I could just about fit into the space, and thought about curling up in it and waiting for Sam to come back for me. I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to calm down.

“Ev, hey,” I heard, and it was so hard to open my eyes. Sam was coming towards me, looking over his shoulder, frowning. “The tunnel is blocked up there. There’s an opening and the wind must’ve pushed logs and, and like, an old boat, I think, in the way. I can see the tunnel keeps going, though. Down deeper. I think we should go back. Maybe the ward will wear off, or we can get a boat and come at it from the other side, get to that opening. Her den’s gotta be down that way.”

The thought of leaving this place, of going back out into the storm behind us, almost sickened me. Made my stomach flip and my guts hot. I shook my head, reached for him, caught his wrist.

“Are you okay?” he asked, leaning down, his free hand coming to my face, tilting it up to see me better. I hadn't known I was cold until his warm skin touched mine, and suddenly I found myself pushing into his palm, and then his body as I practically slammed myself against him.

“Not just me, I guess,” I heard him murmur. It didn’t make sense, but I didn’t care. What I cared about, what mattered, was that he pulled his wrist free from my grip and put his hands on my hips, drew me against him. His hands went lower, cupped my ass and held me there while I clutched at his shirt. I felt like all the molly and ecstasy I’d ever done was back to haunt me. My legs were watery and weak, but my grip on him was tight as if letting go was going to send me into the jaws of a waiting tiger. I giggled at the absurd thought, and I knew Sam was feeling something too when he laughed back at me, then put a hand over his eyes for a moment. He took a deep breath and I stalked it, going onto tiptoes and kissing the side of his mouth. He made a noise, surprised and pleased at once, but he wrapped one hand around my throat and pushed me down. But not away. His free hand splayed across my ribs, his thumb under my breast. I leaned into him and he shut his eyes again, for just a moment. When he opened them, they were green and glassy.

“It’s the demon, Ev. Being so close to her lair. She must…be in heat, or it’s the ward. It’s messing with us.”

“I don’t care. I’m scared, Sam.”

“Then don’t—” he said, but his hands were still on me, and his eyes, like he never wanted to look at anything else.

“I _want_ to! Do…do you want me?”

His answer was to guide my hand to his cock, hard and trapped tight in his jeans. Both hands, and I could push on the base of it with one and stroke down his leg to the head with the other.

“Let me see,” I whispered. Any louder and he would have heard the terror in my voice. He was huge and I was a virgin and there was a monster somewhere nearby, but if I didn’t do this I was never going to forgive myself. “Let me, Sam, please, just—”

“Okay, baby,” he said, and I blushed. He unzipped his jeans and with a closed-mouth groan, tugged himself free. He was so hard, and so big. Silky and golden as if he liked to lie naked in the sun, and I wrapped my hands around him and stepped in close, rubbing the head of his cock against my belly. He let me play with him, exploring his thickness and length and he kissed me while I was doing it. My eyes, the shell of my ear and my cheeks, and lips when I finally could look away from his cock. He rocked against me gently, framing my body with his parted legs, trapping me back against the ledge and when he moved again, harder, and I suddenly, truly, realised what he could do with all that power, a whimper escaped me. Full of lust and fear and I did it right into his mouth as he kissed me, holding my jaw open with a thumb on my chin.

“Ever had a cock in your mouth, Ev?” he asked, chest rumbling with it.

I nodded and put a finger up, words utterly lost to me.

“Just one? More than once? Yeah? Did you like it? That’s good, sweetheart. Can I be next?”

When I nodded again, he kissed me hard, shoving his tongue into my mouth, sickly sweet with cinnamon. It made me salivate and when he pulled off, I was gasping for breath, lips wet and burning. He took a small step back and yanked his shirt over his head and dropped it on the ground between us, and I melted slowly down onto my knees, the material keeping my skin from the rocks.

His cock was dark and stiff with blood and my hands looked very small and pale when I wrapped them around it and brought him to my mouth. Sam put his hands on the ledge, and I’d never felt so protected in my life than with his body curled over me. When I touched my tongue to the head of his cock, licked around it, his breath sent pebbles skittering behind my head and I saw the muscles in his thighs flex, wanting more. My position wasn’t an elegant one, trapped against a rock wall and his jeans still half on, but I did what I could, gripping and pulling him into my mouth, sucking hard and slicking both hands with spit to stroke what I couldn’t get inside me. Sam held still. I was so much smaller than him and there was almost no room, and soon I was hanging off him, using his thick cock for purchase and dragging myself up and onto him, trying to get him down my throat even though it seemed impossible. I was drooling on my knees, whimpering and tugging on his balls, amazed at their weight and how they overflowed my palm, and he was motionless, a statue, a stone idol, and I was worshipping at his feet.

“Like that big dick, huh?” he huffed. “Always knew you’d be a little slut for it.”

He was right, and I pulled on him, begging him wordlessly to move, to do what I didn’t have the space to do. I let my jaw fall lax as he pushed, pinning me against the ledge. His cock hit the back of my mouth and kept going, hurting, burning, and my eyes teared up, my mouth filled with saliva as I gagged, but he went up on his toes for a second, changing the angle, and I think it surprised us both when he slid down into my throat. It _hurt_ , and my body jerked away automatically. Nowhere to go, and all it did was make me go tight around him, made him groan, but he stopped. Just waited where he was, more than halfway down my throat and he _had_ to be able to feel my pulse there. He waited and I almost panicked, nails digging into his thighs, but then I realised I could take a thin breath through my nose, and I relaxed. He felt that.

“Fuck. Feels so good. Even my brother couldn’t do this. Only you and him, baby. All I ever wanted.”

Sam twitched his hips back, unsealing my throat, and it was easy now to let him fuck my mouth however he wanted. He didn’t try to get so far into me again, just pumped his hips fast. Short, hard thrusts, and fuck, I wanted him to fuck me just like this. I wanted to tell him that, was mumbling around his cock and blowing bubbles trying to talk, but I didn’t want him to stop doing this either. He saved me from indecision by suddenly hauling himself back and away from me. I looked up at him, wet-eyed and breathless and strings of saliva between us, and he was the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen. Eyes half-closed and dark, cheeks and chest cherried, his hair sweat-curled on his neck and forehead and he dragged it out of his eyes carelessly as he stroked his cock once with his other hand, running his fingers along the slick mess I’d made of it. He was something wild, feral, and dangerous to everything except me.

“Ev,” he said, and held his hand out, “c’mere.”

I took it, and he pulled me up and into his other hand. Touching my shoulder and chest, plucking idly at my top before slipping around to my back and down, and then he had both hands on my ass and lifted me onto the ledge. Then there was no space between us. Every part of him that could be was shoved up against me, and there were rocks digging into my palms as I tried to keep him from pushing me over, and his cock was so hard where he was rubbing it against me.

“Will you let me, Ev? I don’t have protection, but I swear I’m clean. Can I be inside you?”

And just like that, reality slammed into me. No amount of demon hormones or teenage fantasy or _whatever_ was going to save me from this moment. I wasn’t what he wanted. I couldn’t be. I bit down hard on my lips, blushing when I realised I still had spit on me. I wiped at it with the back of one hand, feeling lightheaded and embarrassed. I wanted to look away from him, but he was everywhere, all around me, over me, touching me. I closed my eyes.

“But, Sam—I’m not—I can’t—”

“Hey, it’s okay, sweetheart. Shh, it’s okay. I _know_ , Ev. Trust me. Do you?”

I nodded, but it wasn’t good enough for him. He grabbed my chin and lifted my face up. I opened my eyes. Sam’s were wide now, jade and whiskey, a smile in them that calmed me. “Yeah. I do. Please, I just don’t—I haven’t—”

“No? Never?”

“No.” At least he let me get away with just mouthing the word.

“Do you want to do this? We don’t have to. We can do whatever you want.”

“I want to.” I managed a little sound that time.

“Do you want me to fuck you?”

“Yes.” A sigh.

“How? There are lots of ways.”

I blushed so hard it hurt, but my body knew better than my mind, hips lifting, angling my butt up on the ledge.

“Want me to fuck your ass? Want me inside you? I want you to feel good. I need you to tell me if it doesn’t. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Don’t cry, baby. You can stop me if you need to. I won’t be mad, anything like that.”

“Okay,” I repeated mindlessly, blinking furiously against the tears. “Kiss me again, please?” I was completely addicted to it, to his arctic breath and icicle tongue, the fiery scent of his skin when I was that close to him.

“Whatever you want, Ev,” he said, the words slurred into my mouth.

His hands again, on my face, pulling my jaw wide so he could lick into me and all I could do was let him, and then he wrapped a fist in my hair and pulled my head back, running that soft, wicked tongue down my neck to my shoulder. His other hand splayed across my chest, his fingertips tracing over my nipples, cupping my breasts in his palms. Sam wasn’t being gentle, but he was going slow, squeezing, gradually increasing pressure to see my reaction, what I liked, how much I could take. I let him leave marks. I pulled his head down to my throat and pushed against him, asking for teeth. I caught the back of his hand and curled my fingers around his until he was digging into my flesh. When I needed more and shoved my top up, he actually fucking growled and scraped his teeth along my breasts when they were bared to him.

The ledge I was on was just deep enough for me to lean back on my hands and watch him, and I was just flexible enough to get my heels up on the edge, and I should have known what that would do to him, but it still surprised a cry out of me when he grabbed my hips and jerked me against him, grinding hard between my open legs.

“Wanna lick your little pink girl cock, Ev. Can I? I wanna put my mouth all over you, need you to be really wet for me if I’m gonna take your ass. Can I? Lick you open and get you wet?”

“ _Please_ , yes.”

He laughed teasingly at me. “Don’t gotta beg, sweetheart. I should be the one begging for you. You’re fucking perfect, you know that? Beautiful.”

My jeans came free easily and hit the ground under his feet where his shirt still was.

I’d never felt like this, _never._ Feverish, almost. My heart beating in the back of my throat. I wanted him so fucking bad, just wanted him to touch me, anywhere, everywhere. Have his hands on my skin, his mouth wet and cold, wanted him to bruise me and hurt me and make it better with his body, the weight of him smoothing out whatever he ruined, and I felt like he was going to ruin me. Wreck me completely. He was going to break me. Too big, too strong. Too much of him, and none of it really mine, and I wasn’t sure I could live through this.

He went to his knees and I panicked, grabbing for him, exposed, but he was out of reach. I needed, _needed_ , and I couldn’t stop him. I wouldn’t. Whatever he was going to give me, I fucking needed it. He cupped my ass in both hands, rolling my hips up, my knees open and wide. And then he was doing exactly what he’d said, his tongue and mouth everywhere on me, almost able to cover me whole. If he was cold like before, I was too hot, too scared and messed up to tell, and he was lapping at me, soaking me, rolling my flesh with his tongue and sucking me into him.

“So smooth,” he murmured, lips tickling tender skin. “I love it. I didn’t know…” He found a scar and nuzzled into it, tip of his tongue and nose, kissing it until I was gasping, and I wanted him to kiss the matching one at my throat. I could have said something and he might have, but what he wanted to do was go lower, laving wide, wet paths with his tongue until he was deep between my legs.

“Here?” he asked, thumbs sweeping my cheeks apart, rubbing soft circles over my hole. I nodded mindlessly, forgot to speak altogether, and it didn’t seem to matter.

His tongue was inside me, pulsing, flicking, deep, fucking me, and nothing had ever felt so good. So weird and slick and just-right, and I closed my eyes, lost in what he was doing. It felt _so_ good. I’d never let anyone do this to me before. I’d never wanted it. Never cared enough about this to share it with someone. Not since Sam. Fourteen and fifteen, barely older than him, hormonal and scared and confused by him and myself and the world in general, but I knew I wanted him this way, or something like it. He knew it, too, even then, but he was for Dean and I loved him all the more because of that, because of his devotion. He’d taught me what to look for, for the rest of my life. I’d never found it, and never really minded. And now Sam was giving it to me, some of it at least, and it was enough, more than what I’d imagined so long ago, lonely in the night, the scent of weed and corn silk and Sam’s skin lingering on my hand, my palm from when I’d gripped him, just brave enough to ask him to tell me a scary story, but not so much to go without his touch, that hand inside my panties, doing what I didn’t like, thinking about hazel eyes and the way he watched his brother.

Something more. His fingers, wet and long, two of them opening me up gently. I didn’t like it. I squirmed away. His mouth followed, drowning me again, and then he stood, looming, a question on his lips. I shook my head. Incoherent, I knew I would be, but I tried. “Just—just, here—”

His hand to his mouth, more spit twisted over himself, and this felt better than his fingers, the head of his cock nudged up against my ass, guided by his hand, his eyes on my face. He was almost completely in shadow now, but I trusted him. I had to. He was pushing, one hand on my hip, and then the other because he’d found his way inside me. It didn’t hurt, it didn’t feel like anything really, just something _there_ , but then Sam rolled his hips and more went into me, stretched me open so wide and full and _now_ it hurt and didn’t at the same time.

“Breathe, sweetheart, it’s okay,” he encouraged, or something like it. I couldn’t tell. I tried to breathe, but it wasn’t like he meant. I was panting, open-mouthed, my arms shaking, and I could barely see him, my eyes wanting to close in some sort of exhaustive agony, and all I could think to do was shove. Onto him, lifting myself up and dropping my weight down on his cock. Pain lanced through me, up my neck, across the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet, making me kick my legs uselessly in his hands and I heard him say _fuck_ like a prayer. He was stone inside me, heavy and thick and I bucked, tossing my head back, knocking it against the wall, not even feeling it with the pain of his cock splitting me open, and now if I was breathing I had no idea I was doing it. I felt like I was gonna die, this was it, I couldn’t take how much it hurt and how big he was—and then all at once the pain was gone.

“S-Sam? Oh, god—”

He was murmuring to me, stroking my face, and it was so sweet and soft and so strange after such intense pain. I blinked, could see him again, one leonine eye, tawny gold and blown with pleasure, leaning over me, the failing sun grasping futilely at the side of his face. It felt good how much I wanted this, wanted him in me, and pleasure at having him bloomed in my brain and my heart and belly, made sweat spring out all over me, made me draw a ragged breath past the rose of emotion in my throat.

Sam was saying something, a question. Whatever it was—

“Yes, please—” I answered, and he moved.

I tensed, expecting it to hurt again. There was a little catch and pull on my flesh and then something gave and he slid into me all the way.

Lightning touching down.

He saw. I don’t know what I did, said, how I looked, but his teeth flashed in a partly fanged smile, and he went onto his elbows, arms under mine, hands on my shoulders, holding me in place as he thrust. Sharp jabs, knocking my breath out of me every time, quickening his pace until I was bouncing, vibrating, and I was glad I was pinned under him because there was no way I could have held myself still. I felt unbearably full, stretched open, and he was so deep and I had nothing to grab onto, was scratching at stone, trying to avoid his skin. Somehow my fingertips found the belt loops on his jeans hanging from his hips and I jerked on them, slamming him into me, and I held him there so he could barely move, but I could feel _everything_ , every last inch of him prying into me, slip-sliding minutely. I closed my eyes and the head of his cock was hot and huge and nudging into my belly. I wondered if I could see it, feel it if I pressed my hands there and the thought sent a bright bolt of fear and pleasure through me. He was jerking his hips impossibly hard and I was panting again, legs wide, loose and open and my skin was too tight all over. I felt one of his belt loops break and he laughed even as I scrabbled for something else to hold onto, ending up clutching at his hair and dragging his head down to mine, teeth to his jaw. He didn’t try to free himself from my grip. Instead, he angled his head down so he could see, watch as he slipped one of his hands between our bellies. Lower, between my legs, and _yes, yes, there_.

“Sam, _please_!”

Another laugh, against my lips, and then he was lapping at them as he spoke. “Can you come for me? Can you do it, huh? Pretty baby, c’mon, I wanna see you—”

I was going to come or lose my fucking mind. Sam’s palm was cupped between my legs, his fingers parting around his massive cock, heel of his hand rubbing gentle circles over my soft, wet flesh. He was barely moving inside me, just flexing, making it jump and pulse—

“How does it feel, Ev? Tell me. Is it good?”

Inconceivably, I remembered something. Dean’s voice. Dean telling his kid brother that he’d done a good job at something. A report card, a math score, digging up obscure lore that the older Winchesters hadn’t known about. _Yeah, that’s good, Sammy!_ And Dean’s shining smile, and Sam grinning back and ducking his head. _That’s my boy_ ; a throaty, gun smoke tinged approval when Sam had nailed every target, even though John had forbidden them from taking me along, and the way Sam’s eyes tracked Dean as he jogged across the field to set up more targets for us.

 _I’m proud of you, Sam_ , said quietly after John’s gone and I’m sitting frozen, ignored and rabbit-hearted at the way the half-drunk ex-Marine had stormed in and hollered at them non-stop for ten minutes about the mess they’d made of the house while he’d been absent the last two weeks even as he made it worse, tossing the rooms like a warden looking for something, only he knew what, and Dean had put his hand on Sam’s back when their dad dumped out Sam’s bag as if his precious lost thing was somehow something Sam would carefully pack for school.

 _I’m proud of you, Sam_ , Dean had said when Sam had said nothing, had let his hands hang loose and free when we both knew he wanted to fist them, uselessly, against his father. Sam had looked up at Dean and there had been tears in Sam’s eyes. Rage and futility and childish hurt, and I was in a cold sweat when John finally left again. Dean had praised Sam for holding back, quietly, just between the two of them; I only heard because Sam trusted me enough that Dean didn’t care I was there. Dean had caressed the soft, delicate skin under Sam’s eyes with his thumbs, pressing the tears into action, catching them, licking them from his finger. I had bit my own finger, a nervous tic. Was biting it now, looking at Sam, the same boy from that memory with the same raw, open expression on his face. I doubted Sam had heard a word of praise since Dean had disappeared, and that whatever I had to say wasn’t going to touch that place in him, but he was telling me he needed me to try.

“I love it, Sam. Love you. You feel so good. So good—”

He sighed hard, leaning, slipping further into me even though I didn’t think he could, that there was nowhere to go. I felt my body open to him, let him in, and it was agonising and wonderful and something arced inside me, flared white-hot where Sam was touching it, kneading it with his cockhead as he rolled his hips.

“Fuck! _Sam_! Yes yes yes, good, good, please—” I was trying, but I couldn’t get words out through my chattering teeth, my body tensing up suddenly so hard my muscles would hurt the next day, my back, my thighs and belly, and he held me down with one broad palm over my solar plexus and the other still gently grinding over my sex. I came, and I screamed when I did, short and loud. Sam laughed, catching the tiny gloss of it in his palm, and he brought it to his mouth, his tongue darting out to taste it before he spit into it and then pulled out of my ass halfway to wet his cock with the mess.

I watched him, panting, clawing at him even though I didn’t mean to, didn’t want to leave marks on him. He wasn’t mine to do that to, but I was his. Whatever he wanted of me. I watched him smear my come and his spit onto his thick cock and I knew what was coming.

“Oh god,” I whimpered. Sam’s eyes snapped up to mine.

“Ev—”

“Don’t stop, don’t, please, Sam.”

“Okay, baby. Okay,” he said, bending over, slick and there, _there_ it was, fucking cold up into my body, and I gasped raggedly. “Shh, Ev, you can’t scream,” he whispered, and I was going to, his breath frosting my ear, but he put his hand to my cheek, offering me a way out and I took it. Turning my head, I pressed my mouth into his palm, smelling my own come and tasting it when I opened my mouth, when Sam shoved into me so hard he had to clamp down on my cry.

“Look—look at me, sweetheart, come on, lemme see your beautiful eyes. Wide open, as long as you can. Fuck, you’re so tight and hot—”

And I screamed again, my throat burning, cold inside, confused, gripping his wrist, holding him tight to my face and scrabbling at his shoulder with my other hand. How could he be so tender and gentle and frightening and powerful? Staring down at me like I was an equation to be solved, a spell to be constructed, and all I could do was look back at him because that’s what he wanted me to do, and no one had ever really wanted anything of me before, and for _him_ to want it—want me—

It wasn’t another orgasm, but I arched, feeling myself dissolve around him and I was somewhere tiny and bright while the rest of me turned inside out, opened too wide.

“Beautiful,” I heard him say again, softly, his lips on mine now, my voice gone along with everything else. “So beautiful. Always, Ev. Perfect, so pretty. I wanted to, I wanted. Wasn’t fair to you, baby. I love you.”

He said that again through clenched teeth as his back bowed, his forehead against my neck, and he shuddered from head to toe, and a second later he pulled out, abruptly, leaving me open and empty and throbbing. His come hit my thighs, the smooth skin between them.

I touched it, little warm pools all over me. I messed my fingers through it and brought them to my mouth, and Sam shot down, startling me, but he only licked over the backs of them and my lips, cleaning himself off of me and kissing me through the fence of my fingers. I felt him touch where he’d been inside me, massaging through the wet, tenderly smoothing his come over my puffy flesh. One long finger slipped inside easily, making me sigh and want. I didn’t understand how I could, but I did. I wanted him again already. I wanted more, different, all of him. I wanted a bed and lube and time and peace. What I got was his slick fingers grabbing my waist and pulling me off the ledge and setting me on my feet. He used his trodden-on shirt to wipe at what was left of his come, and then he said, “We have to go. _Now._ ”

He helped me into my clothes and shrugged into his ruined shirt after buttoning his jeans. He took my hand and tugged, but when I didn’t move he frowned at me.

“Ev?”

I didn’t know what to say, or how to speak. My legs wouldn’t work and my eyes closed involuntarily. I felt cold. From him. Inside, and it was spreading through my guts and seeping into my blood and freezing my bones solid where I stood. Another tug and I almost fell. He made a face, and I would have laughed at it if I’d been able to feel my own. I thought he said I was in shock, but I didn’t understand how that could be. Didn’t I have to be in pain, be wounded somehow to go into shock? I tried to speak. It came out noise. I didn’t want to leave. We were safe here. It was absurd to think so, but we’d been together here, had not been harmed. Maybe we should stay, and nothing bad would happen—

“C’mon, baby. I got you.”

He picked me up, onto his hip like I _was_ a baby. I had enough sense to wrap my arms around his neck, my legs around his waist. He squatted and grabbed the bag of weapons and then started running. That he kept his feet under him and us from falling was a miracle. The farther we got from the tunnel the better I began to feel and by the time we were back at the shore I asked him to put me down.

“You sure?” he asked, holding me still, his voice soft in my ear, his lips in my hair.

I nodded. “I’m okay. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said, letting me slide down his side, his arm around me until he was sure I wasn’t going to fall. There was another look on his face, one better suited to his brother, and under different circumstances, I might have stuck my tongue out at his slightly-smug self.

I expected to be sore, but I wasn’t. I felt…kissed. I felt like he was still touching me, licking me, lips and tongue and teeth here and there on my body. My breasts, between my legs, my neck and mouth and my fingers from when he’d cleaned his own come off of them. I felt soft and wet and gently used, and I tried not to stumble as I followed him along the beach, distracted and unbearably sleepy. If there was wind, I was unaware of it, shielded from everything by Sam, and what he’d done to me, and I didn’t understand for a moment what was happening when Sam stooped down and wriggled something out of the muck. _Shell_ , my brain finally supplied, the word forming slowly and carefully.

Her car was gone when we broke through the trees and Sam cursed and whipped out his phone. He thumbed it as he took my hand and picked up the pace towards my truck down the lane. Another curse.

“Sam?”

“Dad’s not answering.” My hand was released in favour of his flask, produced and uncapped expertly, tipped up and drained and pocketed in a few step’s time, and then he had me again, pulling me along, phone back at his ear.

“Bobby! Yeah, I know—when? Do you think—yeah, okay. Hold on. Ev, keys?”

We were at my truck and Sam had his hand out. I wasn’t gonna argue. I handed him the keys and slipped across the bench seat to the passenger side and caught the phone when Sam tossed it at me. On speaker, Bobby’s voice crackled.

“You were right, son. She’s been going in and out of this portal to Hell, it’s where she was hibernating before, why you couldn’t find her the first time. Usually, the male wakes up earlier, got his honey-do list. If she’s got John, that’s where she’s gonna put him to finish her Fiji Mermaid, and once he’s in there, you ain’t getting him back. You gotta break the spell _before_ then, get it?”

“Yeah, Bobby. But we tried to get there just now. Her ward—” Sam said, my truck flinging dirt as he peeled out and hooked us around, back the way we’d come.

“I got something for that, too. A hex bag. Should make you invisible to the ward and any boobytraps she might have devised to slow you down. You probably got all the makin’s on hand.”

“Hell?” I couldn’t wrap my head around what I was hearing. “Like, actual _Hell_?”

I could hear Bobby turning his back on me with his sigh, but he answered anyway. “Let’s say it’s like Hell’s attic apartment. These’re pretty low on the totem pole demons. Probably not even minions. Wilder…and _old._ Maybe nature spirits gone darkside somewhere along the way, and they spend part of their time marinating close to their source and the rest of the time harassin’ people topside. Like demonic snowbirds.”

There was more, and Sam was keeping his eye on me as much as he was driving. I smiled at him, able to actually feel my face again. I wrote down what Bobby said we needed to make hex bags out of, my handwriting all over the place as Sam raced back towards town and the motel.


	4. Chapter 4

Nothing looked out of place from the parking lot, but Sam told me to stay put. A knife in one hand, ready, he slipped into the room, but poked his head out a minute later, waving me to him.

The bottom of the lake smell was still there, but his dad wasn’t. There was no sign of a struggle that I could see. I cleared a space on the table as Sam rummaged through bags, taking a few trips out to his dad’s truck and coming back with bundled herbs and a scrap of red cloth.

He tore the scrap in half and laid both pieces out on the table. A black marker was used to create a symbol, star-shaped and dotted carefully between the outstretched arms. They were identical as far as I could tell, but Sam spent a long minute inspecting them both before he seemed satisfied.

“Sam…”

He dumped herbs and what looked like bird bones into a granite mortar before grinding it all up together coarsely. I jumped when his hand snaked out and plucked at my clothes, but he only retrieved the daisies he’d tucked into my pocket earlier. I was amazed they’d survived the wind and…and what we’d done.

“Sam?”

No answer, didn’t even look at me; focused on ripping a certain number of petals from the flower and dividing them between the two cloths.

The scraps were bundled up and tied shut with silver wire he snipped from a spool. He dumped the tools back into their box and only then did he look at me.

“You don’t have to come with me this time, Ev. You can go home. Here’s a hex bag and you can take the knife with you.”

“Sam!” I was embarrassingly close to tears for no good reason. “Stop, please. I’ll go with you. I just… I just need. Need you. For a second. Please. Sam.”

There was something sinister about his smile, but I would only understand that later, a year from now. Now, I just put my hand out, reached for him because my legs were still stupidly shaky and my heart was a snared rabbit struggling in my chest.

“Okay, baby,” I heard, felt more than anything, the rumble of it in my ear as he gathered me up, my head against his chest. I was off my feet for a second and then we were both on the bed, the clean one, and I couldn’t detect the marshy odor in the room while so close to Sam. He was all sweet sweat and salt and heat and I burrowed closer to him, wanting to hide inside him, have his shadow cover me, erase me. He chuckled and I felt his legs shift, one long thigh come up between mine, pressing a little gasp from me. He had a hand in my hair, keeping my head against his chest as he spoke.

“I liked that. What we did. I meant it, what I said about wanting you. Before. When we were young. I didn’t know what to do—or at least what to do with you. Do you forgive me?”

“Yes.” Of course I did. _I_ hadn’t known what to do with me back then.

“Are you gonna be okay?”

I knew what he was asking. Was I going to be able to handle him leaving again. Was I going to be okay with this between us, with this one day, this one time.

“It was the magic, though, wasn’t it? It wasn’t really you, Sam.”

“It was me, Ev. It was you. As much as it was just you, it was the same for me. I promise.”

I could be content with that.

“I love you.”

That was even better. “I love you, Sam.”

Quiet, soft silence.

I woke shivering. Sam was gone, the motel was silent and clean of any traces the Winchesters had been here. I panicked, tumbling off the bed and to the door, and I bounced off Sam coming back through it. He kept me from landing on my ass, barely.

“I-I thought—you weren’t—”

“I wouldn’t leave you. Not without saying goodbye first. Not again.”

A frostbite kiss, dry ice breath against my lips. I wanted to ask about it, but I was honestly afraid of the answer. It was harder to swallow this time for some reason, to lick my lips back to body temperature, and there was something to the taste of him now, something secret and dark and thick, heavy water from a black ocean.

“Would it be okay to park my dad’s truck at your place? I don’t want to leave it here and my dad’s not gonna wanna stick around.”

“Oh.” It wasn’t an answer.

He was really going to leave.

“Ev?” The door was open behind him, the late afternoon sky a too-bright frame around his body, casting darkness over his expression.

“Yeah. Yeah, Sam, okay. By the shop.” I knew I was acting weird, but I was floating and cold and in denial. Sam didn’t seem to take it personally, though. He made sure I had my knife and my hex bag tucked safely on me, gave me a little tin of lighter fluid and a knockoff Zippo, unlocked my truck for me and closed the door after another kiss, another slip of frozen tongue. By myself I felt, if not better, then more focused at least, and by the time we got to the farm and Sam tucked the truck alongside the old VW Van I was sure hadn’t been there yesterday and joined me in the Ford, I was warm again (the heater on high on a summer afternoon helped) and my body was cooperating with me, my coordination returned.

I drove us up to the house. My parents were gone. I let myself in, Sam at my heels; I had to shove food in my face, not having Sam’s tolerance for starvation. I apologised, but he flashed dimples and leaned against the counter to wait for me as I darted to the bathroom first. He wasn’t where I’d left him when I emerged a couple minutes later, but came down the hallway from my parent’s side of the house instead.

“Thought I’d do the same while we’re here,” he said. “Figured they had their own back there.”

An apple in hand, I let Sam drive us back up to the lake.

“I feel like I should be more nervous,” I observed around the apple core. Sam had taught me to eat the whole thing. “Are you? Aren’t you worried about your dad? Or about getting hurt?”

Sam shrugged and pulled off where I pointed. We were going to try to boat over to the other side of the island from the deeper part of the lake.

“I don’t think about it. Not until afterwards, at least. It hits me sometimes how dangerous this is in random places. Watching a movie, showering. Never usually during or before.”

“Must be a survival instinct. Useful. Here,” I said, handing him the tire iron out of the back my truck. He tossed it into the bottom of the beat up bass boat that belonged to Amanda’s grandfather. It was always tied up at a waterlogged dock this time of year for anyone who wanted to use it, an archaic motor lovingly tended and bike-locked to the boat. We all knew to refill the gas can when we were done.

There was no evidence of the storm as I steered us towards the northeast side of the island. The iron and the hex bags kept us safe, kept the wind from ripping at us again, kept us in our clothes and I wondered if I was disappointed about that. If Sam was. The boat eased through calm waters, and if it weren’t for the gentle throb between my legs, I would have thought this morning all a dream.

We tied the boat to a heavy log and crept up the bank and through a huge split boulder Sam had spotted. Past it was another entrance, this one nothing but a series of dark wells we had to carefully drop ourselves down into, and it might have been a sewer with the fetid air we had to breathe as the ground swallowed us.

Lower and lower into the earth, after descending maybe fifty feet, the narrow holes and ledges widened out into a tunnel, probably the other side of the one we had been blocked from entering on the other side of the island. I would have missed the Y in the tunnel on my own, but Sam seemed to know it was there. He produced a little bright flashlight that did its job well, but there was nothing to give away that the entrance was there. Just a split in the wall Sam could barely squeeze through; he’d simply turned into it, looked to make sure I was following him still, clicked off his flashlight and disappeared through it without a word.

We ended up in a cave. It was lit up enough I could see Sam easily, but I couldn’t find a light source strong enough to account for the visibility. The brown walls dripped with lake water, the drops pattering around us in a gentle rain, the only thing gentle about this place. It stank of death and rot and was littered with bones gone soft with the moisture, and I wasn’t sure, but I knew, some of them were human. They were mostly jumbled on the far side, and I tried not to look too closely.

There were calciferous growths on the ground and above us, a snaggle-toothed maw we crept into. Sam was quick to dart behind a sort of wall of river stones that was half propped up against an old sixteen-foot-long dorey, flipped keel up and strangely preserved in a place I had to guess was underwater most of the year. Or maybe it wasn’t, maybe whatever was creating this strange glow that made the contents of the cave visible to the naked eye kept the lake from inundating this place.

“It’s her den,” Sam whispered as if he knew my questions. “Look!”

I followed his gaze and gasped when I saw what had him drawing his knife. Another fissure in the stone across from us, but this one was lit up, a bluish dazzle sparking with energy around an alien blackness, a flat curtain of dull ebony that seemed to covet my gaze once it settled there, tunneling my vision, inviting me to look deeper, come closer, step through, free fall. I blinked and looked away from it and saw John.

Sam’s father was naked, a pale shape in the anomalous glow of the portal. Illuminated too by the circle he was in, some insane sigil scraped over bedrock, glowing a sick green. Soapstone or children’s bone, scratched white and chalky into a marker John was at the center of. Lying on his side, his back to us, I honestly thought he was dead he was so still. His body showed no signs of life; if anything, it showed a life in exodus. There was vomit spewed across the circle and worse down the backs of the man’s legs. The smell that hit me in the tunnel was tenfold now, John its source.

“Sam!”

“Shh, I know,” he said through his teeth, sounding almost angry about it, and clamped a strong grip around my wrist. I looked at him, confused. He was shaking: I could feel the vibration up my arm, but it didn’t look like fear. Anticipation, excitement. Fury and maybe grief, his eyes flicking from the portal to his dad over and over.

“Is there an altar?” I asked, trying to understand.

“There.” He pointed with the knife and I saw a cluttered scrap of wood balanced on a rock. I couldn’t make out what was on it, the flickering, shifting light of the circle had the objects dancing with shadows, making them breathe and writhe in place. “If we destroy the altar now, she might not come out of hiding. I need her to come out.”

“But your dad—”

John was not okay. He was convulsing. What I thought was a trick of the werelight at first was the muscles of his back twitching and cramping and I was pretty sure blood was darkening the mess of fluid leaving his body.

“I have to wait, Ev.” Even the words were trembling now.

Our wait wasn’t a long one. After a handful of breaths, Sam shifted and ducked a little more behind our rock pile. I had given up looking, couldn’t stand to, was watching Sam instead, but I peeked over the edge just as the light around the portal went cobalt and the nixie stepped through.

Naked, sinuous, her hair a tangled, dirty curtain around her body, she walked sure-footed through the broken bones and wet rocks to the circle John was in, and as she did she _changed_. Her skin cut itself open and reformed as scales down her face, her arms, breasts and belly. Not armoured, they wove themselves around her in a pattern I recognised from the tattoo on her ear and her soft flesh was still visible in places. She buckled forward at the hips; it looked as if she were going to fall, but in a staggering stride her legs became fused, serpentine, and she propelled herself the rest of the way towards the circle as a snake from the waist down.

Blue eyes went dark and skull-like, opened up into watery, milky globes like something pulled up from the bottom of the ocean. Clawed hands reached out, lifted her medusa-body over the lines of the circle and then grabbed onto John.

Sam bit his lips between his teeth but did not move. She rolled his father onto his back, and bile rose in my throat. His eyes and mouth were open and drooling thick, syrupy silver slime. It overflowed from his ears, the tips of which were blackening, becoming like the nixie’s, as were the tips of his fingers, his eyelids, his lips, his cock. He was hard and I wanted to cover my eyes as the nixie mounted him, a vertical slit for a cunt opening at the front where her thighs had come together. She held herself up on her hands as her body writhed on John’s, and I could see his eyes on her, moving as if trying to look away. Into his open mouth, she spit something, regurgitated more of that silvery fluid into him.

“The altar,” Sam mouthed at me and flicked his knife the other way, indicating he was going to come at the nixie from the side, while I was should go behind her and destroy the objects.

He stood up and started forward. I scuttled to the left. Intent on her business, she didn’t notice either of us until I was fifteen feet from the altar and Sam was at the edge of her circle, and it was only him throwing a glass jar over her head and it shattering on the ground between her and the portal that got her attention. She looked up, furious and hissing, spitting that mercurial saliva through pinprick fangs.

“Ev, the lighter!” Sam called, pointing to the oil that had spilled from the broken jar. I hesitated, the smell of sandalwood so out of place in this carnage-filled den. If I lit the holy oil, blocking the nixie from retreating back into her portal, I would lose the lighter, wouldn’t be able to burn the altar, and we would be trapped in here with this creature.

“ _Do it_!” Sam all but screamed at me, and I did, startled by his ferocity, and whatever had been keeping me from being scared before was in swift retreat now. A flick and toss, a flare of red-gold and the nixie let out a howl of rage and launched herself off of John. Twisting impossibly, she came at me but Sam was there, his knife out and he dug it into her back as she cleared the circle. I stumbled back, fell, fumbling for my own knife.

The nixie reared up, almost as tall as Sam, and she swatted at him, black razors for claws. He tumbled back, taking the knife with him, and when it was free of her flesh, she roared again and flung her arms out. Sam spun away as if pushed, slamming into a stalagmite and crumpling to the ground. And then she turned back to me.

“Bait,” she snarled, hissing steam for a voice. “Halfling child, we’re going to eat you. My _nicor_ will need to feed when he wakes and we will bite you screaming. _Blutfresser_ next, he is _bad_! So bad, good to kill him—”

I was trying to get away from her, tripping over rocks and backing hastily towards the holy fire burning hip high and heatless, but she darted forward, cut me off and I ended up with my back at her altar and my knife in front of me and it might as well have been a feather. I had no real idea how to use it and she was fucking terrifying and I was going to die—

A movement behind her and I had only a heartbeat to prepare myself, to brace for impact and try to aim as John dragged himself to his feet and stepped out of the circle, arms and face going black as they passed through it. His eyes, blood-filled and translucent grey at the iris, met mine for a moment. Two strides and he shoved the nixie. Onto me, onto the knife. I thrust as it happened and then the knife was jerked, embedded. A screech told me I hadn’t killed her outright but then I was hit by a flailing arm and went down against the altar and there was an odd exploding sensation in my kneecap as I hit the ground.

My vision dimmed somewhat and it was John I saw when it returned. Leaving the magical circle must have killed him, left him skin-stretched and bloated, a corpse too long in the water. Discoloured and oozing but even as I covered my scream with my hand, he was changing, drying up, his skin cracking open.

Something thumped hard against the ground and I pushed myself up. Tried to, to get away from the nixie flopping nearby, her silent agony evident in the snapping of her tail, the baring of fangs. She was trying to pull the silver knife from her breast and I must have _just_ missed her heart, but her hands sizzled and smoked as she put them to the hilt. Her agony was moving her closer and closer to me and I scrambled to get away, but it was too much. A monster and a dead man, a broken knee and where was Sam?

Right there, over the nixie, waiting, timing, and when he saw an opening, his own knife went into her other shoulder, and he used the hilts to haul the thing up against his chest, yarding her thrashing and shrieking body to the overturned boat and throwing her down over it.

One knife plucked from her chest, he took careful aim and slammed it down again, through her bicep, pinning it to the boat. He did the same on the other side and I thought I heard him mumbling as he grabbed the nixie by the hair, bent her head down even as she snapped at him. Gore on his fingers, he smeared something onto the wood. A sigil in black blood.

A flash of metal in his hand, thin and long and I recognised it as one of the antique silver hat pins my mother had in her collection, had in her room, that Sam must have stolen when he’d gone to that side of the house earlier. He used it now, pushed it through the nixies throat and the creature spasmed, arched, screamed as he did and Sam was chanting an incantation.

The nixie was gurgling, hissing, chittering, and it was horrible to my ears, but then I heard the word _Dean_ come from Sam’s mouth mixed in with the archaic language he was muttering, and the grotesque nonsense the nixie was spewing suddenly began to make sense.

“You’re the thing they’ve been whispering about. The boyking, the made-demon, blood drinker. He’ll take the bait, they say. Your lover, brother, soul-mate. Sold his soul for you, saved you. Saved you, he thought. You’ll save him, trade yourself. That’s what they want. That’s what you want! Save him, because you ruined him. That’s what you think. He’s ruined _now_ , this is something I know. Ruined, killing to stay alive. Let him out, let him out, _let him out_! He’ll send you soldiers to rule. A Knight and his King, and all the world will scream—” and she kept talking, impaled and vibrating in agony, her body heaving with every breath.

Sam loomed over her, another blade in his hand, this one wicked-long and serrated and engraved, his father dead and charred at his feet, and I wanted him to, was _willing_ him to kill the thing, silence its incessant hisses which were rising in pitch and speed. Sam just stood there, plastered with filth and blood and rank water from her cesspit lair and something was itching inside me, in my ears, on my tongue, behind my eyes as if I’d inhaled sand, breathed it in and needed to cough.

“Sam!” I cried and tasted copper with the word.

He turned his head. The nixie’s claws had laid open his cheek cleanly, triple razor blade slashes and my stomach turned, sure I saw bone beneath the blood. Sam’s eyes showed no pain, though. They showed nothing except a reflection of the crackling portal behind me. Red on black. Sam’s eyes were solid black, and I screamed his name then.

“Go, Ev,” he said, motioning to the tunnel.

“No, Sam, please, just kill that thing and come with me! Kill it! Sam, please—”

“Kill it,” he echoed, and smiled, bloody-mouthed and black-eyed, and he moved finally, taking two steps forward and slicing through the nixie’s throat. Blood sprayed out with her last breath and Sam clamped one of his hands over the wound. There was no way he was going to save the creature. I didn’t understand.

“Sam—” I pleaded, trying to get to my feet. I couldn’t, something grinding and throbbing in my knee.

“ _Go_!” Sam bellowed at me, and if I had been able, I might have. He was terrifying. Eclipsed eyes, bloodied face and hands and arms, dead things all around him, and yelling at me, the only thing left that had not died because of him.

“I can’t, Sam! Please, I need your help, please—”

For the last time, for a moment, he looked like the boy I had fallen in love with so many years ago. His expression softened and he ducked his head, thinking. He was so smart, so sweet and caring. Strong and gorgeous and kind.

“I love you,” I said helplessly.

His head came up and I shut my eyes. I couldn’t bear those shiny obsidian holes in his face.

“I’m sorry, Ev. I told you. I have to go after Dean. I know where he is now.”

I looked at him reluctantly. I was crying, I couldn’t stop that either. Crying and broken, and Sam was going to leave me, just like he’d said and there was nothing I could do. Nothing I _would_ do, and my heart hurt. “Where?”

“Hell,” he said and turned those terrible eyes away from me. He dropped the knife to the ground. His knees hit the dirt a second later and he leaned over the body of the nixie, gone from flesh coloured to silvery-grey in death. Sam took his hand from her throat, and I clapped both of mine over my own mouth as his went to the gash in the demon’s flesh where warm blood still bubbled.

Mouth open wide, he drank from her, sealed his lips over as much of the wound as he could, and I could see him swallowing. What didn’t make it down his throat poured over the bridge of his nose and down his cheeks and throat and chest, dripped from him steadily, and he kept drinking.

I thought about it. I looked at the silver knife beside him and wondered if I could get to it and if I would do it. I thought maybe I should stop Sam, but it was pointless. My leg was useless and Sam would know I was coming for him. He always knew, and I didn’t think I really could, anyway. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it for love.

And he was still drinking.

I saw stars.

I opened my eyes and they were everywhere. No moon, the lights from the dam hidden behind the rise of the hill, and the stars were stale and rude and sharp. I blinked when some of them disappeared, but there wasn’t anything in my eyes except Sam standing over me, blotting out the sky. He looked down at me, his face clean of blood, but in the darkness, I couldn’t see his eyes.

“Sam?”

“Someone’s coming for you, Ev. They’ll find you, baby, don’t worry.”

I smelled smoke. I knew what was burning.

“I love you,” he said, his voice rough as if the blood he’d consumed had been boiling. “Thank you.”

“I love you, too,” I think I said. I wanted to say it, but whether I did or not he wouldn’t have heard me, having turned and walked off, disappearing like a shadow in the night.

The next time I saw him I was sure it was him the second I laid eyes on him, and I was positive I wished I hadn’t. There was no mistaking Sam, or his brother. The car was a dead giveaway, the Impala like a sleek panther, growling her displeasure at the crawling pace set. Sam was in the passenger seat and I was standing outside the student lounge hall, ready to cross the street to my truck in the parking lot, and through the thin evening crowd, his eyes found mine. Sunflowers and summer sky, they were bright and beautiful, but I hadn’t forgotten. He didn’t move, and I didn’t, either. Couldn’t. He was every nightmare and wet dream I’d had in the last year come to life, come to haunt.

I stood, shivering as he looked at me, as the car rolled slowly by, Dean’s bloodied knuckles guiding it. Sam’s brother was all pout and lashes and even the long shadows seemed scared of him, angled away from his cheekbones, leaving him skull-like and stark in the gloaming, and Sam was still looking at me. I looked back and somewhere I found the courage to acknowledge him. Just a flutter of fingers, peeled off the books I clutched. A weak wave, a scared ripple between us, and Sam smiled. He ducked his head, smiled only for me, crookedly, keeping it from Dean.

I thought the name and the man’s head swung lazily around and those witchfire eyes lashed out at me, madness seeping from the corners, contagious; anyone who looked too long back at him would never recover.

Sam was looking at Dean and what one brother was sick with, the other had it just as bad. They looked like angels, looking at each other. Rapture on their faces, the apple, stolen, at their lips, and Dean’s widened, stretched out into a devilish smile that was all teeth and a hungry, hooked tongue behind them. He nodded and turned away, forward, coolly obedient to whatever Sam had said or done.

The car was almost stopped and somehow I was the only person on the sidewalk, as if everyone with any sense had fled the scene, gone inside, hid. The Impala was an earthquake, steady and strong, deafening. It was night now, how long I had been standing there impossible to know. I was in the dark, they were in the light. The light wanted them, was pushing at the confines of the car and she fought, shuddering, pained, ready to run, to let it case her.

The light would never win and Sam was looking at me, a beautiful boy and some kind of demon and he’d walked into Hell and back out again with his brother, and for whatever reason, he wanted me to know.

My knee hurt, ached like I was standing in ice water and it was splashing me through my clothes. Onto my belly, my thighs, between them. Touching my lips. I whimpered with no sound that I could hear over the dull, deadly roar of the car. Sam saw, and he turned his head, said something else to Dean, his eyes still on me even as the car huffed and almost clawed up the pavement in her eagerness to leave. Sam’s eyes, azure and jade and gold and ebony, they tracked me until the last second, the last possible moment, and then the Impala’s tail lights flared, embers, and they were gone.

I never saw Sam again. I think I heard about him, but I tried not to listen, not to hear about grisly unsolved murders, urban legends come to life, new scary stories to tell in the dark. I didn’t listen, but I heard anyway. I’d also heard, and I remembered, what the nixie said: _The boyking, the half-demon. He’s ruined now. Let him out! A Knight and his King, and all the world will scream—_

They were out there.

Impending doom.

Or salvation.

Whatever they were doing, it was for love.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from John Hersey's My Petition for More Space: "It was not just my hurt look, it was not really a hurt look at all, it was the look of a steep fall: and she was seeing what was already, to her, at nineteen, an old, old sign, enabling her to make yet one more claim..."  
> and The National's [90 Mile Water Wall](https://youtu.be/S1DERCNG_l8)  
> Thanks to [Addie_D_123](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Addie_D_123/pseuds/Addie_D_123) for her emotional feedback and telling me I should turn what was an [amazing dream](http://silver9mm.tumblr.com/private/130991761525/tumblr_nw35h2iRRs1skt7p1) into a story.  
> I struggled with how to tag this because the OC character Ev is MtF person, but they are possibly asexual, as the intimate moments between Sam and Ev are precipitated by the nearness of the nixie and her magic: in the truck, at the farmer's market and especially during their first foray into the cave. Ev knew they loved Sam, but sexual attraction wasn't an important part of that. That's not saying the sexual contact wasn't consensual but that it might not have happened without a magical push.  
> The rape and character death happens to John Winchester at the end of the story.


End file.
